I was looking for new feeds about online teaching today and accidently came across a blogspot blog that has some very useful information for me as a online professor. One of the necessary evils of an online class is some way to measure participation of the students, in an asychronous class this is usually accomplished by disucsion boards. Thr normal drill is that I post the initial question, then the student must make a main reply and then respond to at least a couple of other student's posts. Most time the main post for many students at least address the question to some extent. The problem is that the replies are usually of little or NO value to teh discussion or the student. The intend is to emulate a class discussion where students are conversing on a topic back and forth as in a live classroom.
The blog I found today offered some suggestions on increase that accountability and encouraging participation in discussions.
http://technologybites.blogspot.com/2009/05/tips-for-online-discussions.html. One specific idea that I would likle to try is having as part of the initial post a student ask a follow up question and then require that they answer the follow up question of someone else. This stears us away from the I agree type of posts. I plan on trying that in my online classes.
John
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