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Crowdsourcing an academic question
May. 30th, 2020 04:07 pmI'm teaching 19th-Century British Poetry and Prose online for the first time in the fall. It's a senior level course, and I'm super excited about it.
I'm wanting to experiment with a couple things, and I would love some input from y'all.
I'm intending to have just five grade categories: midterm, final, essay, discussions, and reading response journal.
Generally when I assign discussions to freshman and sophomores, the grading is very based on the quantifiable (make a certain numbers of posts/replies, posts have to be X number of words in length, posts have to reference the text, etc), and students generally get full credit if they meet those quantifiable metrics. I provide questions for the students to answer on each discussion board. These discussions are also not worth a great percentage of the final grade.
These discussions are generally adequate; sometimes the students get really into it and talk to each other, but mostly they make their one post and their reply, and then they're finished. I would say that most of the students make posts with appropriate (sometimes even really thoughtful) content, but I don't generally get lots of enthusiastic discussion that mimics a classroom discussion.
For this senior level course, I want discussions to be really robust and meaningful, and I'm going to assign them a pretty heft percentage of the final grade accordingly. I just learned that our LMS has video posting built into the discussion boards, so I'm going to allow students to video post if they'd rather do that than text post.
So, what I'm asking (and I'd love to hear from professors and students): What sort of directions do you give students in upper division level or graduate courses on discussions? How many posts and replies do you require, or do you leave that up to the student? Do you provide prompts/questions? What other requirements do you make for the discussion? How do you assess the discussion? What tips do you have for me for making the discussion as robust as possible?
I haven't assigned a reader response journal in a long time (more than a decade) and never in a senior level class. It's going to be worth the least of the grading categories, and I'm intending it to be an informal assignment where they turn in a short document responding to what they've read that week. I'm intending it to be a place where they can hash out their essays for the course; so it would be a place to talk about what they like, what they don't like, connections they notice to other texts/courses/their interests, things that confuse them. I intend to respond to these weekly giving suggestions about turning these ideas into papers.
Any suggestions for the reader response journal assignment in terms of directions or assessment? Is that a terrible idea? Should I just give them weekly quizzes instead? LOL
*chinhands*
I'm wanting to experiment with a couple things, and I would love some input from y'all.
I'm intending to have just five grade categories: midterm, final, essay, discussions, and reading response journal.
Generally when I assign discussions to freshman and sophomores, the grading is very based on the quantifiable (make a certain numbers of posts/replies, posts have to be X number of words in length, posts have to reference the text, etc), and students generally get full credit if they meet those quantifiable metrics. I provide questions for the students to answer on each discussion board. These discussions are also not worth a great percentage of the final grade.
These discussions are generally adequate; sometimes the students get really into it and talk to each other, but mostly they make their one post and their reply, and then they're finished. I would say that most of the students make posts with appropriate (sometimes even really thoughtful) content, but I don't generally get lots of enthusiastic discussion that mimics a classroom discussion.
For this senior level course, I want discussions to be really robust and meaningful, and I'm going to assign them a pretty heft percentage of the final grade accordingly. I just learned that our LMS has video posting built into the discussion boards, so I'm going to allow students to video post if they'd rather do that than text post.
So, what I'm asking (and I'd love to hear from professors and students): What sort of directions do you give students in upper division level or graduate courses on discussions? How many posts and replies do you require, or do you leave that up to the student? Do you provide prompts/questions? What other requirements do you make for the discussion? How do you assess the discussion? What tips do you have for me for making the discussion as robust as possible?
I haven't assigned a reader response journal in a long time (more than a decade) and never in a senior level class. It's going to be worth the least of the grading categories, and I'm intending it to be an informal assignment where they turn in a short document responding to what they've read that week. I'm intending it to be a place where they can hash out their essays for the course; so it would be a place to talk about what they like, what they don't like, connections they notice to other texts/courses/their interests, things that confuse them. I intend to respond to these weekly giving suggestions about turning these ideas into papers.
Any suggestions for the reader response journal assignment in terms of directions or assessment? Is that a terrible idea? Should I just give them weekly quizzes instead? LOL
*chinhands*
