5. You want to increase participation and interaction.
PARTICIPATION
Robin K. Hill
University of Wyoming
To foster more collaboration in and out of the classroom, you can set up discussions in an online course, for students, and you, to share reflections on topics. Online course platforms also provide mechanisms for the definition of groups for collaborative projects, including exchange of documents.
COSC 2010-05 Discusson
Pedagogy: Cultivate discussion as an intermediate between talk and writing; it's more contemplative than classroom discussion but less so than formal composition. Ask "intermediate-level" questions with some structure, not open-ended questions; provide example answers. Consider requiring discussion (with grade impact), to overcome shyness, and requiring several contributions over different days, to thwart hurried and superficial comments. If you plan to employ collaborative document development, try it out with some trivial task, so that your students can practice the procedure.
Platform:
- Provide subordinate collaborative sites, linked from or embedded in the course site, controlled by students.
- Allow selective access to be granted to outsiders.
- Provide indexing on discussion contribution by thread, participant, group, and chronology.
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