Note to our regular Science Anywhere readers: This post is another assignment for the TRU Online Teaching and Learning (OTL) courses I need to complete. If you are interested in these OTL courses go to TRUBox. They are free. 🙂
OTL 301 – Post 4 Begins Here –
This activity asks me to: … interview a colleague who has taught in a continuous entry course. Interview them about their strategies for facilitating both social and cognitive presence in this learning environment. Part of this conversation may include providing background information on the Community of Inquiry model and the characteristics of teaching presence.
It then suggests six possible questions asks me to summarize the interview.
Answer: What follows is my interview with Gina Bennett, which was conducted asynchronously over e-mail. I outline the questions we will discuss early in the interview. In an effort to make the interview more of a conversation, I also answered the questions posed in the interview. If you don’t wish to read the entire interview, skip down to my conclusions at *** to see what I thought were highlights.
Interview
Ron: My interview is with Gina Bennett of College of the Rockies (COTR). What is the official title of your current position with COTR?
Gina: My official title is ‘Instructional Designer’ but that doesn’t really describe what I do. We’re a really small college so behind our job titles many of us wear several hats. Besides some curriculum work I coordinate our online courses & academic innovation projects at College of the Rockies.
Ron: Both Gina and I initially taught open continuous entry courses early in our careers. My experience was with North Island College (NIC) and I taught numerous math and some physics courses in a continuous entry format, but at that time (1980s and 1990s) they were primarily paper based courses. I completed my master’s degree (in astrodynamics) at a distance in the mid-90s. Teaching at a remote centre (in Bella Coola) meant that some of my students were local and some were at a distance, but they were all continuous entry. By the time I began teaching on-line, NIC had gone to semesterized courses and we were encouraged to make our courses ‘Lock-Step’ so they were no longer continuous entry courses. (I describe Lock-Step delivery in my post “OTL 301 – Post 1”.) Gina, what was your experience with continuous entry courses and were they on-line courses?
Gina: I started taking online courses way back in the early 90’s. I started with an online program in Teaching Adults, through Cambrian College. It was really just a traditional print course pack with email support. It was totally self-paced & I must say I really enjoyed the experience, which amounted to having my very own online mentor. When the opportunity came to teach online, I designed an open-entry adult upgrading (GED) program in Math & English. When I first got hired at College of the Rockies of the Rockies in the late 90’s, I continued to teach the GED program to online students. It was also delivered in a continuous entry format. We ran it that way for a couple of years.
Ron: Is there anything else you would like to say with regard to your introduction?
Gina: Nope, that’s about it 😉
Ron: Thank-you. I’d like to make this interview more of a conversation between us rather than a formal interview. As you know, I’ve been asked to complete the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) Online Teaching and Learning (OTL) courses as a condition of my employment with TRU where I am an On-Line Faculty Member (OLFM). I am now in the final course and as part of my fourth blog post I’ve been asked to interview a colleague who has also taught in a continuous entry course. Here are the topics I’ve been asked to address with you:
- how to promote community and connection in a continuous entry course;
- strategies for facilitating the process of critical inquiry, especially those leading to integration and resolution;
- how the strategies in Chapter 3 might be modified for a continuous entry course;
- digital tools to support the process of critical inquiry in a continuous entry course;
- questions that you have struggled with;
- questions that your interviewee has struggled with.
Some of these may not apply to your experience so we can just skip those and the interview will have to stand without them.
Ron: The first topic is “how to promote community and connection in a continuous entry course”? First I believe the ‘community’ being referred to here is a Community of Inquiry (CoI), which was discussed at length in the first two OTL courses. Back in my paper-based days a CoI consisted of me as the instructor and one student at a time. Establishing a wider community would have been very difficult at best, so it was never really discussed. However, now that we have learning management systems with forums, blogging capability, and other means of student-to-student communications built in, it becomes possible to attempt establishing a wider CoI within each course. Now the question becomes more, “How do we get students to participate in their CoI,” given the technology that exists to support it? I don’t have a good answer for this one other than making a participation mark part of their grade. In a continuous entry course this is even more difficult because students are not in the same place in the course and each is progressing at their own pace. What do you think about this topic, Gina?
Gina: I agree that encouraging a CoI or CoL1 in a continuous entry course is very difficult. I’ve never been able to make it work. I have at times ‘forced’ students to contribute to an online forum by making the forum posts part of their participation grade but because all students were at different points in the program there were seldom 2 students with enough in common to actually carry on a ‘conversation.’ I honestly don’t think forcing such participation did them any good. They resented it & couldn’t see the value & after a while I couldn’t see the value either. Later I devised some assignments that would coax them to involve their ‘home’ communities in their learning: topics to talk about with their partners or children or friends in the community. I think that was more successful; i.e. rather than trying to get a CoI going in the online course, try to encourage more of a CoI in the learner’s own community.
1CoL = Community of Learning
Ron: Interesting. I used to encourage my Space Science and Astronomy students at NIC to include their spouses, children, and/or friends in their lab work, which was all completed remotely. This worked best with the observation labs. Some did that and seemed to do better because of it. I also encourage discussion by offering bonus marks to students who posted space news and astronomy type topics for the class. While I hoped this might spark some conversation between students it never did. The keen students who didn’t need the extra points to pass the course posted, and the ones who could have used the extra marks didn’t. I also got some posts that were on … um … less than scientific topics. 
Ron: The next topic is “strategies for facilitating the process of critical inquiry, especially those leading to integration and resolution”. My experience has been more one-on-one with students. Depending on the period in my teaching career it was either face-to-face in the Bella Coola centre, on the phone, or on-line (in the past 16 years) using e-mail and other communications technologies (such as Skype, etc). In these cases the conversation necessarily centred on that student’s particular learning needs at that time in an effort to enhance their understanding of a topic or just to help them plan their progress through the course. So I guess my strategy has always been to communicate with the student directly through the means that were available at the time. Today this communication is almost entirely via e-mail. What do think about this topic Gina?
Gina: Wow, ‘strategies for facilitating the process of critical inquiry, especially those leading to integration & resolution.’ That’s a mouthful! But I think most of us who have been teaching for a while do this automatically when communicating with our students. Like you, most of my online teaching has involved one-on-one interactions with students & most of that communication has been either via email or through some sort of messaging system within the LMS2 (e.g. Moodle’s message system). Sometimes I’ll respond to a student’s forum posting so theoretically my response is one-to-many but because most students have moved through one at a time on their own schedule, the communication ends up being more direct & personal.
2LMS = Learning Management System
To encourage critical inquiry, I like to ask provocative questions about the material &/or the student’s response to the material & then take it from there. Another way I’ve tried to encourage integration of the learning is through marking assignments. I like to add lots of comments (when I have the time!) & turn the assignment from merely an assessment activity to a bit of a dialogue.
Ron: Thanks again. I also use many comments when I’m grading and not all my comments relate to places where the student has lost marks, but are intended to enhance the student’s understanding of the material. It does turn the assignment into more of a dialogue.
Ron: The next topic is “how the strategies in Chapter 3 might be modified for a continuous entry course”. (Readers, you can download the PDF of Chapter 3 Here if you are interested.) This is a long one. The strategies referred to start on Page 55 of the chapter (p.11 in Acrobat Reader) and go on for several pages as the authors compare face-to-face to on-line components of blended scheduled courses. Below are the strategies mentioned along with my thoughts on each as it might relate to a continuous entry course. My comments are in (italic). Gina, please jump in when you have a comment.
- Facilitation is based on collaboration and discourse; use collaborative learning principles in small group discussion and joint projects. (Ron: This will, of necessity, become an asynchronous discussion that individual students will add to as they reach a given point in the course. The student who makes a comment will probably not be the student who responds to comments on his/her contribution because they will have moved on.) Gina: Yes, it’s hard (if not impossible!) to arrange a small group discussion or joint project in an asynchronous course! Maybe we should be encouraging our asynchronous students to be keeping a blog, where others can post comments (thereby supporting an asynchronous sort of ‘discussion’)? I have, in the past, responded to a student comment with a comment or discussion I’ve heard from another student – again, a poor substitute for a real ‘discussion’ but maybe gives the student a sense of belonging to a larger learning community.
- Model and encourage responsiveness and immediacy behaviours in interactions with students. (Ron: The OLFM will have to ask current students to respond to comments left by previous students. This could be in a forum or on a blog, for example, that remains with the course as it progresses with time. However the OLFM will have to periodically ‘clean out’ old comments as they become irrelevant or future students will have a lot of extra material to read through.) Gina: Yeah, I think the only thing we can do to ‘model responsiveness & immediacy’ is to respond to the student as soon as possible, especially if they have a provocative question. We really want to encourage them to question the material & the learning process.
- Model and encourage affective expression by sharing experiences and beliefs in discussions. (Ron: This should not be a problem. The OLFM can share his/her thoughts about the topics being discussed or current student comments easily in an asynchronous situation, just as they would in a synchronous discussion.) Gina: I agree, & my students always seemed to appreciate this kind of sharing.
- Share the facilitation of discourse by having students summarize discussions. (Ron: Students can be asked to summarize what they have gained from the topics being discussed in the asynchronous mode as well as in the synchronous mode. But the OLFM will have to monitor, interject, and at times even edit where necessary to guide the discussion and prevent misinformation from creeping in.) Gina: I think this would be a rather forced activity in most cases. In any asynchronous discussion involving students long gone & a fair bit of time between posts, the ‘discussion’ is going to seem like more of a random list of independent posts.
- Model and encourage critical questioning, divergent thinking, and multiple perspectives in discussion through provocative, open-ended questions. (Ron: This will essentially be the same in a continuous entry course as it would in a scheduled course. Either way the discussion is asynchronous.) Gina: I have taken some asynchronous courses myself & this is the part I liked best: one-on-one email (or forum) discussions with the instructor. Felt like I had my own personal mentor. 🙂
- Model and request practical applications of knowledge and/or formulate and resolve a problem in small group discussions. (Ron: Same comment as for strategy 5.) Gina: I agree.
- Encourage and support the progression of inquiry in discussion and small group activities through triggering events, exploration, and integration to resolution. (Ron: Same comment as for strategy 5. The progression will need to be built in at the design stage of developing the course.) Gina: Yep.
- Use development or scaffolding of both content and processes to support behaviours that move discourse through integration to resolution. (Ron: This will need to be built in at the design stage so students will usually be responding to the course instead of each other.) Gina: I think we tend to do this quite naturally as teachers – we don’t usually want to just provide the answer but instead create a learning environment in which the student is helped to move forward under their own (growing) intellectual power.
- Use discussion summaries to identify steps in the knowledge creation process. (Ron: Some pre-written summaries might be hidden from students until they have accomplished a certain activity or posted on the particular topic of discussion. This can be done through the LMS.) Gina: I never thought of this but it sounds like a good idea.
- Use discussion material to illuminate course content and encourage students to incorporate content from discussions in their assignments. (Ron: This will essentially be the same whether the course is continuous entry or scheduled.) Gina: … and we are always happy when we see a student incorporating something learned before into new learning or some product of learning.
- Use peer review to engage students in a cycle of practical inquiry. (Ron: In a continuous entry course this becomes very tricky as students will move on after they complete each task. As a result they may not see the peer review that a later student might write about their comments. Of necessity the discussion then becomes between the student and the OLFM.) Gina: I have used this in only a very limited way, by saving past student work (with permission, & usually with names removed) to show current students examples of what’s been done before. Usually I just choose really good examples for students to review & get them to apply a rubric or whatever to evaluate the previous student’s approach or conclusions but occasionally I’ll save a not-so-great piece of work, modify it until it would no longer be recognizable to the author, & use that as an example.
- Maximize virtual connection and collaboration by including synchronous communications; chat, collaborative whiteboards, interactive video, blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc. (Ron: In a continuous entry course this becomes next to impossible because by nature this strategy is synchronous, and the continuous entry course is asynchronous.) Gina: Yes, after all this is the nature of asynchrony, right?
Ron: Right. 😉 Do you have any other thoughts on these, Gina?
Gina: Nope, that’s about it!
Ron: That took a lot of time to respond to, so thank-you very much for your responses. The next topic is “digital tools to support the process of critical inquiry in a continuous entry course”. Since it is unlikely that students will be in the same part of the course at the same time, normal group discussions are not going to happen and much of the student’s interaction will be with the OLFM. In an effort to not burden the course various social media could be used to engage the student in discussions with a wider on-line community. Assignments could be designed to allow the student to interact in the ‘real world’ such as in citizen science projects or in a wiki. What are your thoughts, Gina?
Gina: You are right Ron, & there are *so* many more social media-type tools available today. I think the education community was a bit slow to see the potential of Web 2.0 & all the opportunities for collaboration it presented, but we do see it now. I know a lot of online courses (f2f3 ones too, for that matter) who encourage or require their students to post or journal to a blog & I know of a few students at least who have been thrilled to get comments from someone who read their blog post.
3f2f = face-to-face
The ‘digital tools to support the process of critical inquiry in a continuous entry course’ example I like best is the idea of requiring students to revise, expand on, or develop from scratch an article for Wikipedia. I have been shocked myself at how quickly the Wikipedia ‘police’ respond to edits in the topics they patrol. In several cases they have been very vigilant at sniffing out possible plagiarisms & a couple have entered into a conversation with the student editor. This is a tool & an activity for a more advanced student with a thick skin 🙂 I think.
But the thing I like about blogs & Wikipedia & other digital tools (citizen science too) is that if the student gains from the experience, s/he is more likely to continue with it even after the assignment or the course is complete.
Ron: Now we are asked to discuss “questions that I have struggled with”. Hmmm, having taught on-line for many years, I mostly solve problems as they arise so I am not struggling with any particular questions at this time. Most of the problems I’ve had to solve relate to the practical day-to-day delivery of online education. As I’ve indicated before, the answer, at least where relating to students is concerned, is usually to respond to student queries and work as quickly, to the point, and respectfully as possible so they know they are supported and can carry on with their course work. Do you have any thoughts on this Gina?
Gina: (See below)
Ron: Our final topic is for me to ask you if there are any “questions that you have struggled with” particularly relating to the delivery of continuous entry courses, but feel free to comment about online education in general.
Gina: Questions I have struggled with? Well, there have been many over the years but like you I think I have more or less worked them out. It takes more to surprise me now 😉
I did struggle a bit when online learning began to emphasize ‘collaboration’ or ‘group work’ or ‘learning communities’ or (it goes by many labels I think). In a more open-access course with relatively small numbers (the usual case for self-paced courses at a small college like ours) I just couldn’t see how really collaborative activities would fit in. But after a few years of trying this & that I’ve relaxed a fair bit & accepted that collaboration & an active ‘learning community’ are definitely not a ‘one size fits all’ sort of solution & many online courses do a good job of meeting learning outcomes WITHOUT all the group work.
Of course, I’ve also struggled with online students who you never seem to hear from: they sign up, log in once or twice, sometimes even expressing very ambitious learning goals, & then …. Nothing. You email them, you email them again, you post in online forums, & they just disappear. Sometimes you follow up by phone, they respond in embarrassment with promises to learn more actively … but all you achieve is to make them feel guilty & they drop out all the same, no matter how hard you try. It’s disappointing when that happens but I do think our online students often lead more complicated lives than our (often younger) face-to-face students & sometimes it’s just not the right time in their lives to add study to their already-full plates.
And occasionally you get the super-keen student who emails you within half an hour of submitting an assignment, wondering if you have marked it yet 🙂 … & you sort of have to settle them down & remind them of *your* timetable as a teacher. But generally it is a pleasure when you get someone so keen.
Ron: Yes, I have had those students who do little or nothing as well. One thing I gained from the Lock-Step method of course delivery that NIC used is the idea of a course schedule with clear due dates. In a continuous entry course posting a list of assignment due dates for the whole class won’t work. Also one of the advantages of an open continuous entry course is that students can progress at their own pace. For a motivated and organized student this works well, but for a student who has a lot of other life responsibilities it is far too easy to procrastinate to the point where they do little or nothing in their course. For my ASTR 1151 students I have devised a ‘suggested course schedule’ that kicks in on their start date. It defines how many weeks after the start date when each assignment should be submitted. Motivated students can ignore it as there is no penalty for not following my schedule, but a student who is prone to procrastination can refer to it to see if they are behind where they probably should be. It has the further advantage that I can use Excel to quickly generate actual due dates for each student and then keep track of each student’s progress relative to that schedule and prompt them as necessary. Preliminary feedback from students seems to be positive.
Ron: Thank-you Gina. You have been very helpful.
Ron: This concludes my interview with Gina Bennett.
*** The things from this interview that stand out for me are:
- For the reasons indicated in this interview, establishing a CoI in a continuous entry course is extremely difficult if you try to keep it within the confines of the students taking a particular course. However if you adopt a strategy where-by students can use their local community as their personal CoI then it becomes more relevant to them and doable. It will also connect the students more to their local community even when the course is over. Of course the ability to do this will vary depending on the subject matter of the particular course. (Establishing a local CoI might be more difficult for students taking calculus than say a first year non-major astronomy course like ASTR 1151.)
- Real-world activities for at least part of the course are another way to improve the relevance of the course and are activities that students can carry on even after they finish the course. We mentioned citizen science projects, blogs, forums, and Gina discussed assignments where students would actually initiate or edit Wikipedia articles relating to course topics.
- Much of the activity of on-line instructors (and OLFMs) is one-on-one. This is just the nature of online asynchronous education.
- Gina’s comments further re-enforce my belief that prompt response to student work and queries is the most important tool an online instructor has to establish a strong teaching presence and keep students engaged.
— Ron Evans (June 2016)
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