[This is my answer to Week 3, Q3: As a teacher of online courses, how do you (or would you, if you do not as yet have online teaching experience) encourage interactions between yourself and your students, as well as between students, and network building with participants outside of the “formal” course? Expand on your answers by saying why you would or would not encourage these interactions, and identify practices that have been successful. Also reflect on the practices of your instructors related to interactions in the online courses you have taken, or are taking.]
I am a strong believer in online interaction. Whether with the learners of the course, between the learners and the outside world and with with the course facilitator. Using the f2f terminology, this interaction is like teamwork and brainstorming that yield synergy. Luckily, this approach started to penetrate our educational system.
There are many methods to encourage collaboration among online learners. All of them will require well designed activities. At the moment, I want to suggest two approaches:
- Use of a scoring rubric that encourages and assesses positive collaboration.
- Use of peer evaluation activities.
I hope you can enrich my knowledge by suggesting more.
The interaction fails when the assessment of the course is based on testing the acquired information rather than measuring incremental knowledge. I.e., courses that rely on route learning. The collaboration in these courses become cheating. Example: courses related to Project Management Professional certifications. Personally, I avoid designing online course for such courses.
Some successful Examples: besides the methodologies followed in this course, I can quote the following two successful examples:
(1) The Intercultural Dynamics in European Education through onLine Simulation: In this course, learners acted as members of a virtual government and each were given specific responsibility and collectively they were supposed to come up with one government plan. Each learner was from different countries with different background. The learning in the fields of politics, languages, cultural difference, teamwork and synergy was outstanding.
(2) Wikipedia Articles: A group of students were assigned the task of writing certain Wiki-articles on Wikipedia. The interaction with the virtual members of Wikipedia was rich and engaging.
Both of the above examples used suitable rubrics.
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