Week 2 Communicating with Your Students

Communication

Communicating with your students is the core of an online class. Active and timely communication supports teaching presence and when instructors participate supportively and frequently students perceive the instructor as both enthusiastic and as an expert in the field. It's also more than student satisfaction on course evaluations. The US Department of Education and the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) have defined the difference between "distance education" and "correspondence education" based on the "regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor."

If interaction is not substantive or is primarily initiated by the student it will be categorized as a correspondence course and students may not use federal financial aid to pay for correspondence education. Online courses, for which students may use financial aid, must have significant faculty-student interaction. Simply posting recorded lectures or textual materials online, along with exams or quizzes, will not meet the federal and HLC guidelines.

Starting out as you mean to go along by communicating in a welcoming and supportive manner from the beginning with a personal and course introduction, an approachable syllabus, and an interactive introduction discussion sets the tone for the class. However, once you get into the semester, faculty can have questions about response time and whether to use individual or group communication. Generally speaking, response to emails and other student questions should occur within 24 hours. Some faculty prefer to disconnect over the weekend, however, that is the time when most students are working and questions may arise. In that situation, you may want to indicate that you will respond to urgent questions only over the weekend. If you are getting the same questions repeatedly, instead of sending an email response to each student it is often more efficient to post an announcement to the entire class addressing the question. If what you are communicating would be helpful to more than a handful of students it is more efficient to share it to the entire group through an announcement or a Q&A discussion.

Moderating Discussion Forums

Transcript - Effective Online Discussions

Class discussion in a live classroom - either as a whole or in small groups - is a great way to get students to interact with one another and with the content. In an online course, discussion forums are often the main means of whole class communication. Whether you use formal discussion prompts or provide informal opportunities for collaboration or topical discussion, moderating these forums is different than moderating a whole class discussion in an in-person classroom.

Despite rumors to the contrary, it is not necessary to reply to every post every student makes in your discussion forum. Excessive faculty posting can preemptively close down conversations. The question becomes "how much is too much and how much is not enough?" The answer to that question can vary based on the course content, the level of the students, and the interest of the instructor, but commenting on around 1/3 of all substantive posts is a reasonable place to begin. Making sure to spread your comments over the course of the week is also important to encourage students to actively and consistently participate over time.

As a good rule, if you will not give participation credit to a student for simply posting "I agree" or "good job," then it's not helpful to model those sort of posts in your own discussion forum participation. As the expert in the subject, you will surely have additional thoughts, further data, or reflective questions to add to any discussion. You can also pull together threads of ideas or themes that you see across several students' posts and make connections back to the course text or primary concepts. Many faculty use some form of Socratic or reflective questioning in their face-to-face classes and similar strategies can also work well online. If you publicly value substantive discussion by giving points for it and modeling it in the forums, students will do the work. Just make sure that when you post additional thoughts and questions you're scaffolding their learning and not talking over their heads.

In addition to moderating, another - often overlooked - aspect of fostering substantive discussion is to make sure your discussion prompt is actually a discussion prompt and not a regular assignment in disguise. "List three reasons why X happened. Justify your answers from the text." isn't actually a discussion prompt. It's a question that the student answers and then walks away having proved to the instructor that they read the book. If you just want to know that they read the book, try a reading quiz in the Quizzes tool. If you want students to discuss why X happened, phrasing the prompt in a way that opens the door for discussion, such as "Based on the text, what do you think is the most logical reason that X happened? Explain your reasoning. Reply to at least two other classmates who suggested different reasons and explain whether or not you think that both reasons could have influenced X. Make sure to reply appropriately to anyone who replies substantively to any of your posts." Instructions like this provide a rationale for replying to one another and provides a reasonable avenue for interaction. It also provides you with easier opportunities to participate by highlighting the complexities of pointing to one single antecedent to an event or movement. For more on using discussion forums, see Discussion Board Assignments: Alternatives to the Question-and-Answer Format. (Faculty Focus Article)