Activity 4 - one question interview

My one-question-interview with Dr Graeme Salter
Head of Program - Bachelor of Information and Communications Technology
Head of Program - Bachelor of Computing (Information Systems)

University of Western Sydney - Australia

Question

data: 10 de Dezembro de 2009 21:15
assunto: online discussion groups

Dear Dr. Graeme Salter
My name is Teresa Fernandes. I’m a Portuguese teacher and an eLearning
student taking a master on Pedagogy of eLearning.
During one of the activities proposed “finding, studying and sharing
materials related to online teaching techniques”, I read some of your
papers “Modeling new skills for online teaching” and “Online
discussion groups: Strategies to enhance participation and
collaboration”.
I considered especially interesting this last one, because I also
consider online discussion groups a powerful many-to-many technique to
increase interaction, reflection and collaboration.
But I have some questions related to online discussion groups that I
would like to share with you and maybe you could give me your point of
view.
As an online teacher what I must think before I start an online
discussion groups? What makes a good online discussion? How can I
evaluate an online discussion?

Thank you and if possible I would like to post this questions and your
answer in the class forum so that the other students may benefit from
it.
Teresa Fernandes

Answer

data 11 de Dezembro de 2009 02:26
assunto RE: online discussion groups

Teresa,

I could write an essay in relation to the questions, but I will keep my answers brief.

1. Before starting an online discussion
a. pedagogy
What is the purpose of the discussion? Is it aimed to help student achieve the learning outcomes of the unit?
b. logisitics
How will I structure the discussion? (eg. starting date, end date, moderated or not, assessible or not, will students be required to respond to others etc).

2. What makes a good online discussion
A topic that is relevant and interesting. If it would motivate lots of students to participate without being assessed then it is a good topic. Sometimes this involves setting a controversial topic (although the rules of netiquette must be made clear). Another pointer to a good discussion is where students actually get involved in online conversations (rather than making a single post).

It can be difficult to find such topics and often we need to include an assessible component to encourage students to participate fully.

3. Evaluating a discussion
Can use standard data collection methods (eg. survey, interview, focus groups). Can also use the discussion data itself. Measurements can be qualitative (eg. what is the level of critique in the discussions?) or quantitative (eg. how many posts/responses are there).

Qualitative can be time-consuming so may want to sample (or get students to self-select their best posts).

A number of researchers are developing tools to analyse the quantitive side in more detail (eg. who are the leaders, who are the followers) - for more information you could contact Dr Shane Dawson at the University of Wollongong http://www.uow.edu.au/gsm/staff/UOW049821.html. He has developed software which graphs the interactions in a visual way.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Graeme