by Hey folks! A few of you asked about the difference between the comments section (found on the bottom of each page) and the forums (a separate tab and separate page). Here’s a good way to think about it.
- The comment section is designed for quick responses to each day’s lectures – easy-access to respond to question prompts, etc.
- The forum sections designed to hold longer discussions with groups of students about specific topics. The forums are a bit more permanent and can be structured by specific topics (for example, one of you might start a topic on “Workplace Issues and E-mail”). Any registered student can start a topic, as general or specific as you would like.
I’ll be monitoring and responding to both, so you’ll hear from me either way. Happy MOOCing!
I am interested in your comments about your students and the use of a Facebook page for the class. It sounds as though you observed both academic and interpersonal results. Do you think the size of a class matters in terms of the results professors could expect from trying a similar approach? More specifically, I wonder if students in smaller classes have more face-to-face opportunities to connect with other students and the professor and therefore might not benefit in quite the same way as students in a large class with less interpersonal interaction.
This is a very interesting line of reasoning, Sandra. But I might wonder (and it’s open to empirical question, of course) whether or not there would still be an effect. I could see the interpersonal benefits perhaps being a bit smaller (assuming that we already know each other, there might not be much room for improvement), but I’m not so sure that the notion of the ‘persistent classroom’ would be affected by class size, would it?
For example, I use the Facebook pages for classes as small as five people (in advanced graduate seminars on media theory) and the primary benefit is that students get to maintain contact with the material, on demand and outside the restrictions of the “Mondays, 4pm to 7pm” format.
What do you think?