Dec 5 2014 meeting notes
December 5, 2014
Retreat
- Now we're leaning toward a full-day Friday retreat
- Judy will Check w/Ann about sub pay from our budget
- Arboretum, Talaris are possibilities
Discussions:
- What are the problems:
- Content-heavy courses (e.g., math, biology) finding things to discuss
- encouraging people to participate
- Recommendations
- rubrics more qualitative as opposed to quantitative
- devote more time to engage w/them
- replaced required discussions with options better connected to their homework (math) and what's on the test...made it extra credit (up to 0.4 on their grade). Focus on things that are more important.
- give prompts that are better connected to what you want them to know
- hold them responsible for what goes on in the discussion...look there to include some of content in the exam
- Think about what the outcomes are for your discussion...student interaction? content mastery?
- Sometimes set the settings so they can't see others' posts before they do theirs (find 3 people who made a mistake and talk about it)
- Use Blooms taxonomy to help them to ask quality questions at a higher level. Submit questions on Google forms that indicate you've read the article, then read others' questions and we talk about it in class. What do I consider an effective question. Goal to have them post questions and answer questions. Would be good to teach students to evaluate each other's work. ask them to evaluate question as to level of Blooms....ask them to ask another question at a higher level of Blooms than the previous one.
- Good idea...answer a question and ask another question...
- Give them a few words to begin the question (why, how)....
- What are people using discussions for?
- students Interact w/content, course objectives (sharing content w/one another)
- students interact w/students--Can label it as Peer-to-Peer discussion if that's what you want to do.
- How much are they worth?
- 15% (Kira) 20-30% (Judy)
- How do we manage/moderate the discussion?
- Check once a day, moderate if necessary, things out of hand
- Some feel that it's (esp in fully online) helping them to feel more like a teacher.
- Post to let them know you're paying attention
- Here's a link to the Discussion about Discussions which contains the rubric Stephanie shared from UW Stout
- Try having them evaluate their discussion work with the rubric at beginning of the quarter.
- Show examples of good and not so good discussion posts, as well as rubrics.
- Kira makes one of the criteria for timeliness (posting by due date of first post, all contained in one assignment).
- For grading responses have them paste the original thing they're responding to in the beginning of their post.
- Stephanie is posting rubric links in the Discussion about discussions.
- QUESTION: Is there a way we can share good examples of moderating a discussion???? Ideas?