Using the Columbo approach on Discussion Boards

As pat of our ongoing development of an electronic laboratory manual at Edinburgh, I decided this year to incorporate discussion boards to support students doing physical chemistry labs. It’s always a shock, and a bit upsetting, to hear students say that they spent very long periods of time on lab reports. The idea behind the discussion board was to support them as they were doing these reports, so that they could use the time they were working on them in a more focussed way. The core aim is to avoid the horror stories of students spending 18 hours on a…

My experiences of teaching online: A case study

My paper on taking a module that was taught in class and moved online has been published in CERP (free to access). The paper aims to share my own experiences in teaching a module online so that others considering this approach might find some information of use. The paper is set against a background of what I consider to be a general disaffection for online teaching among staff and students. This is apparent from surveys by the DRHEA—which reports that the main use of VLEs is as content repositories; the UK HEA (pdf)—where students ranked “e-learning” as the least enjoyable…

Supporting Virtual Communities: Reflection on Module

As we complete the Supporting Virtual Communities module, we are asked to reflect on our learning during the module, by replying to some of a range of prompts given. Two prompts are considered in this report: “The Muddiest Point” and “To the Future”. While they draw on different aspects of the module activities and my own learning, they focus on my main interest in e-learning – namely the facilitation of discussion boards. References marked with an asterisk are ones that are new to me and I have included them in my annotated bibliography. The Muddiest Point “Why do we interact…

Supporting Discussion Boards – Some Literature

The following is an annotated bibliography for the Reflection on Learning post for the module Supporting Virtual Communities. Links to references are available at: http://www.delicious.com/mkseery/SVC DeVries, J. and Lim, G. (2003) Significance of Online Teaching vs. Face-to-Face: Similarities and Difference, E-LEARN 2003, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, November 7-11, 2003. [PDF at http://bit.ly/d3OpyK] This conference paper compares face-to-face teaching with online teaching and notes many similarities. Some strategies for encouraging learner-learner interactions, which the authors discuss as a very important interaction in online learning, are outlined – including pairing/grouping new learners to seed discussions and build on these to generate discussions to…

Interacting Online – problems arising out of discussion boards

I wanted to post some thoughts on the use of discussion boards in VLEs – both from the perspective as a learner and as a tutor. My impetus is that if online learning is to be truly beneficial in place of in-class learning, interactivity is the core driver. Discussion boards are fantastic in this regard, but I have come across some problems in recent usage. Discussion boards architecture Discussion boards are a useful locus for interaction between peers and between tutor and learners. In my role as tutor, I feel I have used them well in terms of providing students…