I was asked twice today if the blogs platform can be used for anything useful in high-enrollment courses. Surprisingly, yes. The first thought that comes to mind is, "How can blogs possibly be useful when you have say 200 people in a course and only an instructor and maybe a TA?" Well I happen to have the answer (and 1.5 semesters worth of trial) in my Comm 180 project.
Comm 180 is a course on the survey of mass communications. Only one section is offered per semester, leading to an enrollment between 200 and 350 students. The instructor wanted to make his course more open and find creative ways to use new technologies to enhance learning. So what did we do? The first semester we introduced blogs as extra credit. It was a very simple "opt-in" for us to gauge interest in the blogs system as well as a test for us to understand if and how we could make the project manageable. Roughly 65% of the 350 students chose to take part in the extra-credit blogging and did a wonderful job. The posts were very meaningful and insightful. We surveyed the students at the end of the semester and the blogs were an overwhelming success.
This semester, based on the success of blogs as extra credit, the instructor wanted to make blogging mandatory. The instructor is doing something unheard of in a class of 200. Giving a participation grade. Students are giving ten topics (one per week throughout the semester) as prompts and have the week to add their thoughts and comments. Each week is worth up to five points with a maximum of 30 that can be earned. Basically, if the student gives meaningful answers to six posts, they have maximum participation points.
So I can hear the crowd asking again (maybe yelling now), "But how can we truly manage this?" Our tag aggregation tool is the trick. Have students use a common class tag (for the Comm 180 class last semester we used Comm180Fall08 as a tag on all posts). The give out a tag for each weekly topic (say B1 for week 1, B2 for week 2, etc.). Now plug these into the tag aggregation tool and voila! You get back all posts that were written for a specific week by that class. Since the instructor and TA only has to look in one place (instead of 200) for the information, it was very easy to check posts and give credit.
I hope this helps someone out there. Let me know if you have any questions!
Comm 180 is a course on the survey of mass communications. Only one section is offered per semester, leading to an enrollment between 200 and 350 students. The instructor wanted to make his course more open and find creative ways to use new technologies to enhance learning. So what did we do? The first semester we introduced blogs as extra credit. It was a very simple "opt-in" for us to gauge interest in the blogs system as well as a test for us to understand if and how we could make the project manageable. Roughly 65% of the 350 students chose to take part in the extra-credit blogging and did a wonderful job. The posts were very meaningful and insightful. We surveyed the students at the end of the semester and the blogs were an overwhelming success.
This semester, based on the success of blogs as extra credit, the instructor wanted to make blogging mandatory. The instructor is doing something unheard of in a class of 200. Giving a participation grade. Students are giving ten topics (one per week throughout the semester) as prompts and have the week to add their thoughts and comments. Each week is worth up to five points with a maximum of 30 that can be earned. Basically, if the student gives meaningful answers to six posts, they have maximum participation points.
So I can hear the crowd asking again (maybe yelling now), "But how can we truly manage this?" Our tag aggregation tool is the trick. Have students use a common class tag (for the Comm 180 class last semester we used Comm180Fall08 as a tag on all posts). The give out a tag for each weekly topic (say B1 for week 1, B2 for week 2, etc.). Now plug these into the tag aggregation tool and voila! You get back all posts that were written for a specific week by that class. Since the instructor and TA only has to look in one place (instead of 200) for the information, it was very easy to check posts and give credit.
I hope this helps someone out there. Let me know if you have any questions!
Erin, this is really important stuff! I'd like to organize a brown bag on this topic. Would you be open to that if I make it happen? Great post and really helpful to people thinking about how to make blogs work in a classroom. A follow up might be on how faculty and TAs are assessing the work -- do they use a common rubric or some other method?
I'd absolutely be willing to do a brown bag! I hope we find some interest out there! The rubric discussion was actually brought up in our bi-weekly ID meeting yesterday so it's obviously something that people want to know more about.