Implementing VoiceThread in an Online Class..in 2 Days!
About a week after we released our Hot Team white paper on VoiceThread, I received a request from a faculty member, Evelyn Thomchick, in the Smeal College of Business about it. She has been teaching an online Supply Chain Master's Program course and had recently assigned her class a Negotiations exercise. She had created 12 teams of 4 to engage in a negotiation where each team represented either 'Raymark' or 'Sentor'. She gave basic case study information about each company, including scenarios for each. She paired the teams off so that Team A negotiated with Team B, Team C negotiated with Team D, etc. In all, there were 6 total negotiations.The Negotiation Post Hoc Analysis Assignment
By the time Evelyn had contacted me, the students had completed the negotiation exercise (the students used negotiation forums and chats within ANGEL). She had asked each team to submit a 3-4 slide powerpoint presentation that provided an ad-hoc analysis that covered:
- Did your team meet your objective(s)?
- Did you follow your strategy? If not, how did it change as you proceeded?
- Why did you reach a successful out come or why did you not reach a successful outcome?
She was receiving each team's powerpoint when she reached out to me about possibly using VoiceThread. Her original thought was to have an Adobe Connect session with each team but she was realizing the major scheduling issues for a synchronous meeting for students in this online class. It was at this point she read about VoiceThread reached out to me. She primarily liked the idea that feedback could be provided in an asynchronous environment within a presentation user interface.
How She Used VoiceThread for the Assignment
On a Wednesday, we met at Starbucks to discuss her assignment and the possibility of using VoiceThread. Evelyn quickly grasped how VoiceThread would work and the advantages of it for this particular assignment. By the end of the meeting, she had decided she would do this:
- She would take the powerpoint slides from each of the teams that negotiated with each other and put them in one VoiceThread presentation. To illustrate, she had Team A and B negotiate with each other. Team A and B sent their ppt slide to Evelyn and she then uploaded the 4 slides from A and 4 slides from B into one VoiceThread.
- One this 8 slide presentation was set up, she assigned the 4 individuals from Team A and the 4 from Team B to that particular VoiceThread. This way, each team could read the other team's post hoc analysis.
- She would then give each of the 8 total individuals three days to review the combined analysis and make comments in VoiceThread.
- In all, she had 6 pairs of teams so she ended up creating 6 separate VoiceThreads
As I said, we met on a Wednesday. Later that week (Friday), Evelyn had uploaded all ppts and assigned them to students. By Monday, students were adding comments. I asked her to give me access to the VoiceThreads just so I could see how this assignment went. I didn't think much about it until I realized that Evelyn had decided on a completely new technology tool to handle an important class assignment only 4 days before it needed to be up and working!
Results
For the most part, students were also able quickly able to get into VoiceThead, review the slides and make comments. Most of the comments were in text, especially the first day or so. Later, other students started making audio comments via microphone. The bottom line is that the students did indeed engage in conversations via VoiceThread and the feedback was meaningful. There were a couple of small hiccups with some student's access to VoiceThread but they were quickly resolved.
Overall, I think this experience demonstrated the ease of implementing and using VoiceThread, both for faculty and students. Evelyn felt comfortable enough with it to make the decision to use it over the course of a one hour discussion at Starbucks (no, I did not use my P-Card). Even more impressive is that she was up and running 2 days later. And she did this with little to no input from me for getting things set up beyond our initial meeting at Starbucks!
Example VoiceThread from the Assignment
I've embedded one of the VoiceThreads from her assignment so that you can get an idea of how this assignment ended up functioning. If you do not yet have a VoiceThread account, click Register! to create a quick account for free. This should take you less than 30 seconds (VoiceThread does not require a lot of profile information to start).
