Published in The Higher Education Journal.  26 (1): 62-64

EIGHT WAYS TO GET STUDENTS

MORE ENGAGED IN ON-LINE CONFERENCES

W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D.
Professor, Texas A&M University
e-mail: www.cvm.tamu.edu
WWW site: www.cvm.tamu.edu/wklemm/bioskh.htm

ABSTRACT

An all-too-common problem with on-line conferencing as a learning environment is that too many students "lurk," that is watch what is going on without becoming actively involved. Teachers should not allow students to lurk in on-line conferences. Nor is it necessary. Presented here are eight tactics that teachers can employ to make students more active learners in on-line conferences.

Anybody who has ever participated in a Listserv knows that many people on the list are "lurkers," people who read the postings but do not contribute postings of their own. Some of us are lurkers on some Listservs while being active participants in others where we believe we have something important to say. And that's fine -- except for students!

Students have a job to do; namely, learn. Learning is best accomplished when the learner is actively engaged in the process (Eisley, 1991; Schmier, 1995). For on-line conferencing, this means that we should not allow our students to be lurkers. We should want them to be active participants, providing input that will make everybody learn and think.

So, if you are one of those teachers who have been tolerating lurking because you think you are doing students a favor, think again. But powerful psychological and social forces converge to make lurking the natural order of things. The popular conferencing software programs also contribute to the problem.

CAUSES OF THE PROBLEM 

Psychological and Social Forces. In a given conference, the students can differ enormously in academic background, skills, and life experience. Some students lack the confidence to assert themselves in public. Some do not like to write. Some may not have studied the assignments. Some are afraid they will embarrass themselves with postings that are not clever, erudite or interesting to others.

A common denominator for all students is the passive conditioning they have been exposed to by years of television and traditional classroom teaching. Both television and the lecture method of teaching put students in a passive, "entertain me" mode. There is little directed or systematic effort to elicit critical or creative thinking. Effort is not automatically required with either television or the traditional lecture mode of teaching. Without intellectual effort, whatever learning occurs will occur mostly by "osmosis." Many students transfer this passive mode to on-line learning activities, functioning as lurkers and not realizing how much more they would understand and learn if they contributed input to the group discussions. Contributing input requires the student to comprehend what is being discussed by others, to create ideas in the context of the topic at hand, organize thinking coherently, and express that thinking with carefully constructed language (hopefully, clearly and concisely).

It is possible that teachers, who have also been exposed to a great deal of television and traditional lecture-mode teaching, may likewise be insensitive to the problem. Indeed, teachers may even contribute to the problem by using an excessive amount of television, VCR tapes, and lecturing in their own classes.

On-line conferences create opportunities for teachers to remedy old patterns of behavior, both the learning behavior of students and the teaching-style behavior of the teachers. Teachers should try to correct the problems of passivity, not reinforce them by tolerating lurking. Many teachers object to putting pressure on students by making them do uncomfortable things. Converting a lurker into an active on-line learner IS uncomfortable for lurkers. Lurking is a bad learning-style habit. One hallmark of a good education is the ability to mobilize a variety of learning styles and not be crippled by a limited repertoire of learning styles and skills. Change is uncomfortable, but is worth it if it improves learning and the ability to learn.

Limitations of Most Conferencing Software. The typical software for on-line conferencing is either e-mail List-serves or commercial e-mail organizer systems such as Caucus, First Class, and others. Even when the mail is organized by the commercial software, it is organized in a topic/sub-topic outline format that students can navigate by simple mouse clicking without being intellectually driven by context within the mail messages. To read such threaded-topic messages, no real search strategy is required. And when a student does want to stop lurking and contribute, little real thought needs to be given on context or on where to put the message -- just attach it as a mail message to a given topic thread. Also, these systems typically do not contain their own data bases for research and resource sharing.

In threaded-topic conferencing, the messages often get posted in chronological order, which is not necessarily the order in which they should be read. For active learning, point and click is not enough. Students certainly don't have to think about how to navigate content; they just point and click on the next message. Such systems make it difficult to keep track of the context in which to add a comment. The comment usually refers to a few words or sentences in the referent note, not the whole note itself. So, very often, we force the others to go read the referent note to understand the context for our note or else cut and paste the relevant portions into our comment. This, and the limited way in which notes can be organized, contributes to a feeling of information overload as the pile of mail messages gets bigger.

Suppose you had a hyperlink-based software that allowed notes to be attached to specific character strings WITHIN a document? Then the student would have to think about content and context in deciding what input to provide and where the best place is to put it. Moreover, students could create such in-context links between and among various notes that they did not think to do during the initial submission.

Have you noticed how this kind of software would resembleWeb pages? But of course the difference is that everybody gets to share and edit documents and create links.

For these reasons, my colleague Jim Snell and I have developed a hypertext-based on-line conferencing system, called FORUM^® (copyright, Texas A&M University)(www.foruminc.com). Both of us have been using it for four years in our courses as an on-line adjunct to the regular classroom. FORUM operates similarly to the World Wide Web, except that all students can contribute input to shared pages, and make links from within them, without writing any computer code or mark-up language. We use this environment to engage the students in debates and group decision, critique of each other's work, and as an environment for case studies [http://www.cvm.tamu.edu/vaph451/casestudy.htm].

One of the advantages of hypertext conferencing is that it supports formal debates. There is a formal system for computer-based debates, called Issue-Based Information System (IBIS). These early systems have been well researched and provide useful information for anyone serious about using software to support online debates or to track and make decisions.

Hypertext conferencing can support a variety of other student activities (http://www.cvm.tamu.edu/wklemm/instruct.html).

We have built into FORUM the ability for a teacher to create structured hypertext that helps keep students focused and on task. The greatest advantage of hypertext is that it allows student groups to create things (deliverables, such as group-based decisions, plans, projects, portfolios, case studies, etc.). Those who believe that constructivist approaches to teaching are important should recognize that hypertext (hypermedia!) systems are much superior to threaded-topic systems. It is time that the educational community should look beyond the conventional threading paradigm.

If you are one of those teachers who would like to stop lurking but don't know how, consider the eight suggestions below:

EIGHT SOLUTIONS

1.  Require Participation -- Don't Let It Be Optional. Set aside a portion of the grade allocation for participation in the on-line discussions. Tell the students that they must post x-number of items each week or for each topic. Critics will say that this approach does nothing to ensure quality of input. But it at least gets the students engaged, and hopefully, once they get caught up in the activity, they will strive to improve the relevance and quality of their work, because now they are on display. No longer can they hide. For many students, it is more embarrassing to make public postings that have no value. As another incentive for quality work, the teacher should grade on quality of the postings. That is highly subjective, but no more so than grading of term papers or essays.

2.  Form Learning Teams. The advantages of so-called cooperative or collaborative learning are abundantly documented (Gabbert, Johnson, & Johnson, 1986; Johnson, Skon, & Johnson, 1980; Johnson & Johnson, 1981; Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Kadel & Keehner, 1994). Collaborative learning can occur just as well via computer conferencing (Kaye, 1991; Klemm, 1995; McComb, 1993) Moreover, asynchronous conferencing overcomes the schedule-coordination problems that plague typical face-to-face learning teams. The advantages for promoting on-line interaction is that learning teams should bond and thus make each student in the group WANT to do his or her share. Helping students learn how to acquire team spirit is important in and of itself, but it also provides students with powerful incentive to become more engaged in on-line conference activity.

3.  Make the Activity Interesting. If it is a discussion topic, make it one that students have a reason to get engaged in. Appeal to their life experiences, vested interests, ambitions. It might even be a good idea to let the students create some of the topics, especially if you provide an over-all academic framework to guide them where you want them to go. If it is a group-created paper or project, let the students pick the subject within the bounds of the academic objectives. Surely, you want more than just "discussion" of student opinions -- a matter discussed in more detail on the topic of academic deliverables (see below).

4.  Don't Settle For Just Opinions. Everybody has opinions. They are like knee jerk reflexes, occurring with little thought once they have been formed. Thus, it is not surprising that many classroom discussion groups on-line are dominated by opinion messages, rather than rigorous analysis and creative thought. Teachers should insist that opinions alone are not sufficient. They must be supported with data and rational discourse and even re-examined in the light of what others in the on-line group are thinking.

5.  Structure the Activity. Give students guideposts to help them think of things to say that are academically meaningful. Choice of topics has a great deal of influence here. Topics should be organized around an academic theme that serves course objectives. Topics should not be so open-ended that students digress.

You can go further, by creating activities that are best performed in a structured way. For example, debates can be structured by requiring students to post a position, to which others respond with pro or con supporting arguments, followed by critique of the arguments. . Or brainstorming can be structured by having students first generate a list of alternatives, re-think the list by creating new ordering, structure, or relationships (Nierenberg, 1982), systematically evaluating each item to produce a "short list" of viable alternatives, and then reaching consensus decision on the best choices, followed by prioritization.

6.  Require a "Hand-in Assignment" (Deliverable). To extend structuring to its logical conclusion, you should require students to DO something besides just express ideas and opinions. They should produce a deliverable from the conference. This kind of activity capitalizes on all the advantages of constructivist theory, which holds that students learn best when they have to integrate, synthesize, and apply information by creating a deliverable piece of work. Such a deliverable can include idea generation and analysis, decisions, plans and designs, proposals, case studies, problem solution, research projects, term papers or reports, portfolios, or role playing. These activities are not supported well by the typical threaded-topic software, but is in FORUM^® (see our white papers), which not only supports group-based electronic publications but also allows students to create links to ideas, files, and graphics in context with specific character strings or objects WITHIN a shared document.

7.  Know What You are Looking For and Involve Yourself to Help Make it Happen. Irrespective of the specific learning activity, the teacher should know what quality work is and should intervene as the work is being developed to steer students in the right direction. When the teacher participates in a conference, providing extensive critique, feedback, and encouragement, students cannot help but become more involved.

8.  Peer Grading. Tell students at the beginning of the conference that at the end of the activity they will be asked to rate each other on the value of each person's contribution. This can be a powerful incentive for students to do quality work in the conference. However, most of the students that I encounter do not like to grade each other. This is especially a problem if they have bonded as a result of operating in a learning team. In that case, they may want to give everybody an A, even when some students made distinctly greater contributions to the conference. Problems also arise by having them rank each other, because they might think that rank 1 gets an A, rank 2 gets a B, and the lower ranked students will get a failing grade.

One possible solution is to have students grade the contributions of another group, which also gives them added learning experiences. Another possibility is to structure the ratings so that they don't translate directly into A, B, C, etc. The teacher might say, for example, that everyone will get an A, B, or C for the peer helping portion of the final grade, depending on the peer helping ratings. The ratings might be in the form of "superior, good, fair, poor," or some equivalent. Another possibility is to have each student name the one student in the group who helped them the most. Students who are named more than once might get bonus points on the final grade. A similar approach could be used with a ranking scheme. Students with the best ranks get the most bonus points on the final grade.

CONCLUSION

Teachers should not allow students to lurk in on-line conferences. Nor is it necessary. The eight tactics suggested here will help ensure that all students are actively engaged in a conference, thus enriching the learning experience for everyone.

REFERENCES

Eisley, M. E. (1991, June 13-15). Guidelines for conducting instructional discussions on a computer conference. Paper presented at the International Symposium on Computer Conferencing, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

Gabbert, B., Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. (1986). Cooperative learning, group-to-individual transfer, process gain, and the acquisition of cognitive reasoning strategies. Journal of Psychology, 120, 265-278.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. (1981). Effects of cooperative and individualistic learning experiences on inter-ethnic interaction. Journal Educational Psychology, 73, 454-459.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1989). Cooperation and Competition: Theory and Research. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Co.

Johnson, D. W., Skon, L., & Johnson, R. T. (1980). Effects of cooperative, competitive, and individualistic conditions on children's problem-solving performance. American Educational Research Journal, 17, 83-94.

Kadel, S., & Keehner, J. A. (Eds.). (1994). Collaborative Learning. A Sourcebook for Higher Education. (Vol. 2). University Park, Pa.: National Center on Postsecondary Teaching, Learning, and Assessment.

Kaye, A. R. (Ed.). (1991). Collaborative Learning Through Computer Conferencing. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Klemm, W. R. (1995). Computer conferencing as a cooperative learning environment. Cooperative Learning and College Teaching, 5(3), 11-13.

McComb, M. (1993). Augmenting a group discussion course with computer--mediated communication in a small college setting. Interpersonal Computing and Technology, 1(3), Archived as McComb IPCTV1N3 on Listserv@GUVM.

Nierenberg, G. I. (1982). The Art of Creative Thinking. New York, N.Y.: Barnes and Noble.

Schmier, L. (1995). Random Thoughts. The Humanity of Teaching. Madison, WI.: Magna Publications.