Building a Conversation with 500 Students

This article appeared as a Syllabus "Case Study", July 2001, page 10. Even after all these years, I find that it still holds up. It was exciting to create a multi-directional Socratic dialogue with a class of 500 students - using Webcrossing software for the dialogue backbone freed me to focus on the students.

FACE-TO-FACE WITH VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
Building a Conversation with 500 Students
Syllabus "Case Study", July 2001, page 10

Americ Azevedo has 500 students in his Introduction to Computers course at the University of California, Berkeley. Despite that, his teaching philosophy embodies the principles of the Socratic method. What makes this apparent contradiction possible is discussion software, a technology that enables him to “teach” and interact with his students outside of class in a flexible, dynamic way. Discussion software connects him, his students, and the TAs for the course, and allows them to communicate much more directly and frequently than they otherwise could.

Azevedo, who has taught courses in computers and human/computer interaction at several institutions, has always believed that the Socratic method is right approach to teaching. In courses with smaller enrollments, he has usually relied upon open-ended questions and in-class discussion while simultaneously tinkering with online discussion formats to supplement the ongoing Socratic dialogue. However, faced with the prospect of teaching hundreds of students in a large lecture hall three days a week for 50 minutes, Azevedo knew that in-class discussion would be nearly impossible and that he’d have to rely on online discussions to achieve his goals.

The immediate benefit of using discussion software has been an increase in participation by his students and a chance for him to get to know some of them quite well. “I can call up a list of all of their contributions to the course and see what they’re like quite easily.” Says Azevedo. “Through the use of the software I get a chance to hear the ideas and concerns of a large number of students. It also allows the shy students to participate as actively as the more outgoing ones.”

Flexibility was one of his primary concerns. “Most of the software that exists for course management is content-centered,” notes Azevedo. “It locks you into specific topics and doesn’t allow discussions to grow naturally.” Because it had many of the features he was looking for, Azevedo decided to try Webcrossing in the course. “What like about Webcrossing is that it’s discussion-centered and allows students to generate new topics, or threads, if they want to. It is really an experiment in developing a pattern language, a new way of submitting thoughts.”

Azevedo’s class site had topics that he’s generated, where he can post course information, posit questions, and link to other useful sites. It also includes many student-generated threads. In addition, the course is supported by the full array of UC Berkeley’s technology tools. For instance, through the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting Network, Azevedo has captured streaming video of all of his lectures. Students can link to these from the class site. Coupled with dynamic lecture notes, PowerPoint slides, and online assignments, the site is a rich resource for both discussion and study. “With these resources in place,” he notes, “we could expand the enrollment of the course to a distance learning situation with twice or four times as many students.”

E-mail is a part of Azevedo’s package as well. He is experimenting with the use of e-mail to communicate with his students, posting information about upcoming lectures to a listserv. Based on student responses, he can tailor the lecture to address the material they need specific help with, and skip what they’ve already absorbed. This has led to some interesting student-contributed material. “I asked them to define some terms that are used in the computer industry,” he says. “The students generated some very interesting metaphors that I used in lecture.”

Azevedo’s Introduction to Computers also has a lab requirement. “With 18 sections of labs 4 hours a week, we’re using all the available lab space,” he says. In the future, he hopes to use discussion software to enhance the laboratory experience, allowing the students in each lab section to communicate with each other and with the TA on projects. He’s also planning to experiment with a CyberLab that would replace some of the lab sections.

According to Azevedo, discussion software can enhance not only large lecture courses, but smaller enrollment courses as well. “When I used it with small classes, it generated a lot of excitement,” he notes. “There was more personal engagement than you get with a large course. My students generated hundreds of pages of text, and the themes just grew and expanded organically.”

In his large course, Azevedo has found that students don’t necessarily participate as much, but he has been surprised by the level of response at times. “I started a debate about participation credits: should students get credit for participating in these large lecture courses? This produced a raging debate on Webcrossing. It was a level of expression that you would normally never get in a large class. Students contributed ideas about how the course should be graded, some of which I incorporated into the course.”

He adds, “My co-teachers, Nicholas Cravotta, quickly adopted the new environment. For instance, he was able to give quick public feedback to a discussion topic led by student-generated questions. Normally, students would never get this kind of feedback in a large class.”

Webcrossing Subscriptions

Webcrossing Community allows registered users to "subscribe" to various folders and discussions. What this means is that the software will track which messages they've read and show them only the new messages.  What happens after that depends on the type of subscription the user signs up for.

You can allow users to do any (or none!) of the following:

• Subscribe by web - users either go to the Message Center for a list of their new messages, or click Check Subscriptions in the toolbar on any page. Each time Check Subscriptions is clicked, the users will be taken directly to the next new message on their list without having to return to the Message Center in between.
  
  This is really an amazing "power tool" that many sites don't understand and subsequently turn off.  It allows somebody to instantly view all the new material on the site (in the areas they're interested in) without clicking around or being inundated by email notifications.
• Subscribe to email for individual posts - users receive whole posts in email
• Subscribe to email notification for individual posts - users receive links back to the forum and notification that a post has been made, but must visit the forum to read the new messages. Users will not receive further notification until they have visited the forum and read the unread messages. This prevents spamming people with notification messages before they are ready to visit.
• Subscribe to email digests - users receive an email digest of all new posts, arranged by discussion, emailed at the time of their choice. The interesting thing about this is that digests don't come at some time determined by the site owner or whenever there is enough material, but instead at the time the user chooses. You an get 24 digests a day if you want - one an hour. Or just one a day. Or just one a week.

Users can subscribe to everything, nothing, or any combination of subscription methods - to the entire site, or to just a subset of areas that interest them.  You could subscribe by "check messages" to the Dogs folder and by email digest to the Cats folder.  The only limitation is that full notifications vs. individual post notifications is a sitewide setting for the user.

Subscriptions are definitely a "power feature" of Webcrossing Community.  Webcrossing Neighbors has some additional subscription features by virtue of its social networking emphasis.

Environment and financial benefits

My company, Direct Learn Services, has used Webcrossing Community for about eight years now. We use it to run short, time limited online conferences – typically, they last around four days. These are hugely popular, and I’ll describe in another post a little about how they work. But in this post, I want to illustrate a couple of points about the financial and environmental benefits of using online conferencing systems. The figures I’ll use aren’t mine – they come from an Athabasca University study, published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Spring 2009. The paper can be seen at http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/521/254.

The study looked at our 2008 Supporting Deaf People online conference. This is totally online, and had 241 participants from 18 countries – a truly international event, running 24 hours a day. The cost to delegates was £50 each (at the rates at the time of the study, about 69 USD). The study examined the carbon footprint and costs which would have been generated by an equivalent physical conference.

Environmental costs

I don’t want to go into the detail of how these were calculated – those interested can refer to the paper linked above. The paper assumed that if held as a physical event, the conference would be in London (we are a UK-based company). So, calculating emission costs for airplane travel for non-UK delegates, travel within the UK for UK delegates, and hotel emissions, the total CO2 emissions would be 431.09 metric tons – or around 1.79 metric tons per participant. (The equivalent in US tons is around 475 and 1.97). So – given that emissions from attending via your computer at home or your normal workplace are very minimal indeed - this represents a massive saving. To put it into context, the average annual emissions per capita in 2005 for a US citizen were 19.52 – so the conference would represent a large proportion of that. In fact, for less developed countries, the proportion is much higher – Brazil’s per capita emissions were 1.76 metric tons – less than emitted for the attendance at a four day conference held in London!

Financial costs

The financial cost, averaged out per delegate, was calculated as 2168 USD – this was primarily travel and accommodation. This compares with the actual cost to delegates of 69 USD – another huge saving.

Was the experience as good?

It could be argued that whilst the physical event costs more, delegates would get a lot more from it. In fact, we don’t agree with this, and I will, in another post, demonstrate that levels of participation in our online conferences, and satisfaction with them, are generally higher than in physical conferences (though, of course, you don’t get the chance to spend a few days being a tourist in London!).

Conclusion

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The reality is that had we decided to run this conference physically, it would never have happened. It would have been way too expensive in terms of both time and money. Our delegates are not highly paid businessmen used to jetting around the world. They are ordinary people, not paid massive amounts of money, and not able to afford to pay nearly 2200 USD for a short conference. And this brings us to the real benefit of online conferencing – it enables people who could not go to a physical conference to attend online and to get first class professional development, at a minimal cost to themselves and to the environment. It gives them opportunities they would not otherwise have had.

Webcrossing Community: flexible mix-and-match features [Part 2]

Last time we looked at Webcrossing Core, the engine that runs everything. This time, we'll look at Webcrossing Community.

As its name implies, Community is designed fundamentally to be used as a web forum, although beyond that there are a million directions you can go.

Community starts with Core, which provides all the fundamental functions like users and access controls and all the various included servers. On top of that are layered scripts to provide a plugin architecture, apply editable CSS automatically as settings are changed, produce the WCMS (Webcrossing Customization Management Suite, a method of customizing without scripting), and allow for translation or just rewording of the User Interface.

Community is fundamentally flexible. You can have an unlimited folder hierarchy. Want to have all your discussions at the top level of your site and no folder hierarchy whatsoever? You can do that. Want to carefully organize your site so every discussion is neatly filed into a folder > subfolder > subfolder > subfolder > subfolder hierarchy? You can do that too. Neither of those may pass the "how to best organize your site" test, but the point is you are not limited by some arbitrary idea of how a site should be organized. It is entirely up to you.

Because Community has a plugin architecture, you only have to install the features that you really want. Install Register Plus to get enhanced user profiles, support for COPPA, and to put a copy of the Terms of Service on the registration page. Install Time Since to see "posted 3 minutes ago" rather than "posted 11 January 2015, 8:45 am." Install a WYSIWYG editor. Install calendars. Or any of 70 other plugins. And they're easy to install. Just click the link to "shop for plugins," find the ones you want, and they are downloaded and installed automatically. Then you decide where to turn them on.

And of course, everything is scriptable.

With Community, you can build whatever type of web forum you want. If none of the plugins do exactly what you need, your new feature can be scripted. It really is almost infinitely flexible. If you need that flexibility and don't need the full-on social networking capability of Neighbors, Community is for you.