As we've mentioned above, the materials in Chapter Twelve have a significant overlap with the materials in Chapter Eight. These might be taught together, or selections might be taken from one to supplement the other.
Because this chapter has some very basic information about e-mail, newsgroups and Web forums, and since a large number of classes will be using these various collaboration technologies, it can help to introduce this material early, perhaps even during the first weeks of class.
We also suggest that you get students used to lists, groups and/or forums early in the term and integrate them into the coursework throughout the semester. If you can get students in the habit of checking mail before every class or posting frequently to a class newsgroup or Web forum, you'll find that the media become much more effective. This isn't always easy; often you'll need to find some incentive for students. But if you make an effort to implement these elements into your class from the beginning of the semester you will be in much better shape than if you try to get your students to start midway through the course.
Reading this chapter, you'll be able to see the difficulties involved in describing the logistics of operating client software. Because so much of that information is contingent upon the setup at your institutions, we have to depend on instructors to provide much of the specific information about how various software packages work. We encourage you to carefully explore the logistics of your system and provide your students with step-by-step instructions about the process.
It will help if you can allot class time early on to setting up e-mail addresses and nickname files if needed. If you take class time to make sure all students know their e-mail addresses and understand how to send and receive mail, it will save you time and effort in the long run because you won't have e-mail questions trickling in for the first six weeks of the semester.
Along with sending out announcements and forwarding relevant mail to our classes, we find that receiving and returning assignments over e-mail is very useful. It teaches students how to send attachments and forces them to use their e-mail addresses. It's an easy way for us to keep track of all the assignments being sent and it means a much lighter load to carry back and forth to campus each day.
Strategies for Evaluating Discussion Posts
One key issue when incorporating informal posts into your classwork is finding an appropriate way to credit student work. When we began teaching with e-mail and newsgroup postings several years ago, we used to make ourselves believe that students would post regularly and engage in "organic" discussions if we just gave them the chance. Although this was occasionally true, we found that often a select group of highly motivated students carried the conversation with minimal input from the rest of the class. To counter that trend, we required posting and assigned topics for students to explore. This, of course, led to more and higher-quality posts, but very little conversation; students saw the lists and groups as a place to put their assignments rather than as a forum for discussion.
We've settled on something of a compromise between these two strategies. Because we've found that students who have no incentive to post often simply will not, we do require posts to be made. At the same time, however, we try to be as non-prescriptive as possible in terms of what the students can post. We tell them to follow the same basic rules of academic behavior on-line that they would in a classroom, but beyond that we place no rules about when posts should be made, what they should discuss, how long they should be or anything else. So after establishing that it's still an academic space, we tell the students that it's a wide open discussion forumpost as you please.
The easiest and most effective way we've found of evaluating the posts is to use a type of portfolio grading. At certain points throughout the semester (usually 2-4 times per semester) we assess a portfolio of each student's three best posts (you can, of course, choose to look at as many or as few posts as you want). We encourage students to post as frequently as they like, but require them to submit only the three posts that they feel do the best job of articulating a position. Our major criteria for evaluation is how well the comments forward the discussion. We've found that this type of grading system allows students the freedom to participate informally in discussions, knowing that only their strongest posts will be evaluated. We find a high rate of participation with many students posting more than the required three messages, and we typically find a more sophisticated level of discussion. (For some great examples of class discussion forums take a look at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~contests/fallforum.html)
One way to keep students involved in discussion forums is to have student moderators decide on topics, post introductory messages, and supervise on-line class discussions each week. Rotate the moderators so that every student has at least one opportunity to "lead a class discussion" on-line.