Running an Online Discussion Board for 400 students: The Teaching Assistant Perspective

I asked the two teaching assistants, Stephanie Craven (an advanced PHD student in classics) and LJ (a 3rd year Medical Student who was volunteering her time) to write a guest post about their experiences with the online discussion board component of my Intro to Rome class.  Stephanie was responsible for moderating and grading while LJ moderated.  The addition of an online discussion board was a new component to the course in Spring 2013; and it was one that, from my perspective, was tremendously valuable for getting the students to think hard about the course material.  It also gave me a great way to see what they were thinking on various topics.  Frequently, I discussed their comments and ideas during class and sometimes expanded on unexpected observations they had made.  At the same time, the tool I used--Piazza--is still in development and is not entirely user friendly for a humanities course.  As well, for a class of this size, where few students knew one another, intense moderation and frequent interventions were required to keep the conversation from lapsing into summaries of the course textbook or lecture.  Stephanie and LJ did an amazing job on that front but, as they explain, it was very time-consuming.

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OVERVIEW

The Piazza portion of Intro to Rome involved two discussion threads per week, each being opened two days before and promptly closed at 9am on the day of class. Students in the 400-person class were expected to post 5 times over the course of the semester, with two of these being before Spring Break. The discussion thread questions were broad (dissertation-sized, even!) and dealt with the material that was due in class after the thread was closed, which generally forced students to read ahead in order to be able to participate. The posts had to be written in clear English, could not be disrespectful in any way, and had to add something to the discussion, either by responding to someone else or by saying something that had not been said before. The net result should be an evolving discussion; it should not look like, nor should it be graded like, a short essay question on an exam.

MONITORING THE THREAD

In order to facilitate this in such a large class, we (Stephanie and LJ) would monitor the thread during the time in which students could post; the idea was to give public feedback for previously written posts, but also to toss open another aspect of the question to another student who had not made it to the board yet. In practice, we tried to make sure that almost every sub-thread ended with a post from us, to either urge students to think more deeply into a subject, or to get them to think about something slightly different when one topic had already been exhausted. This left places where the latecomers could join the conversation; they just had to think a little harder, and maybe look in sources other than the lectures and the textbook.  Here is an example of how our comments interplay with student posts:

During the 43 hours in which the thread was open, we were vigilant about incoming student posts. Initially, we thought that we might only need to check perhaps 3 or 4 times a day. (LJ:) One of the big things was getting my schedule to align with the number of posts per week. At first, this was hard to gauge, but after we got to Spring Break (when the first two posts were due), it became clear that there would be a deluge of posts starting 2 weeks before the deadlines. On the slowest weeks, it might be okay to check Piazza a few times a day; on the busiest weeks, my phone application would give me new post notifications about 20/hour. I would go to bed at 10pm and wake up at 4am, and there would be 40-50 new posts. (Stephanie:) And thank goodness LJ kept those hours, because those students were nocturnal. Midnight to 4am had some pretty heavy traffic! This is one of the reasons why it was very good to have two of us doing this job.

PREPPING

            For each of the questions, we did not have a list in our heads of what we were looking for, per se. Some weeks, Dr. Ebbeler would let us know afterwards that we had covered the main points of what she was looking for… but prep consisted of reading the assigned material, thinking about it on our own, and looking at what students were posting. Both of us are experienced enough with Roman History that we can deal with its concepts beyond the class material. Sometimes students came up with the main points on their own or, even more thrilling, they came up with things that we hadn’t thought of; usually, though, we would look for things that they had not seen, or aspects that seemed to be misunderstood, and focused our comments and pass-along questions on bringing out those missing elements.

GRADING

(Stephanie): We graded students based on 0, 1, or 2. I was fairly lenient: 2 ranged from excellent to just saying something new; 1 for so-so quality of thought and use of materials; and 0 for lack of thought or complete repetition of others’ points. Part of the leniency was admittedly due to the fact that there were so many of them, and they could try to post as many times as they wanted until they had five 2s. There were few complaints with the grading. Only one person ever contacted me after a bad grade to ask how he could make his posts better; however, the ones who started posting earlier in the semester generally had a decent learning curve. (That said, having done this once, it will be a lot easier to establish criteria for the next time around.) My grading process was to read through the thread in the order in which students had posted, using Piazza’s Note History tool. This process could take me anywhere from less than an hour on slow days to 8 hours on the last post; I kept a full record of all the posts on a separate spreadsheet and generally reported the grades on the day that the post closed. The bottom line is that the grader needs to be able to move through posts quickly while grading, but still have to be prepared to spend a lot of time with it.

SOME UNEXPECTED GOOD RESULTS

(Stephanie:) One fun thing that came out of Piazza was that it was a way to add supplemental material that wasn’t intrinsic to the core material but was interesting to both instructors and students. Sometimes this happened with students asking questions (one student, for instance, asking about Rome and science) or instructors who just wanted to talk about something (I did a post about piracy with photos from my trip to Cilicia); eventually, LJ and I started asking toss-out questions on the threads about things that were interesting to us but not in the body of material that students were expected to know (for instance, some went to find out about Vespasian and the urine tax). We actually started receiving researched responses from students about things we tossed out. In addition, we began to get thoughts from students who applied knowledge from other disciplines.

 

(LJ:) One of the requests that students had made in the Fall 2012 semester was for more links to modern ethical scenarios. When we decided to post two final, last chance “clementia” threads at the end of this semester, we had them discuss biomedical ethical issues such as mandatory vaccination and clinical trials. This sort of discussion had been incidental in one of the penultimate threads, about Hadrian’s ban on circumcision, so it looked like a promising discussion topic. It was exciting to me to see students with science or pre-health professions backgrounds pull from what they’d learned in their other classes or extracurricular experiences and use it in the discussion. I was warned beforehand to not go too in depth with the medical or scientific discussion, but I felt this was warranted when students made posts that demonstrated an understanding of the prompt that clearly went beyond the scope of this course.

THINGS WE MIGHT CHANGE

The Piazza system is really good for allowing students see each other’s work and ask questions as a group, but it’s still developing and definitely could use some adaptations before it can be used more widely in the humanities. The system is equipped with the expectation that students will be graded on the number of times they post rather than the quality of those posts, and can be a little cumbersome (but not preventatively so) for someone grading based upon content. Aside from some issues with the Note History tool, which was changed for the worse in the middle of the semester, my main recommendation would be a starring system within threads, so that instructors can more easily highlight examples of good student posts within the discussion. Still, I think it’s a workable system, the support staff at Piazza is very responsive, and it’s far superior to the discussion tool on Blackboard, especially for a class this size.

For our own logistics, we would recommend a policy next time that would distribute students posts more broadly across the semester; this would make for more interesting discussion and for more fluid grading.

TAKEAWAY

            On the whole, we feel that this was something fun for us to work on; it allowed us to put our knowledge of Roman History to work, and even gave us a venue to introduce students the supplemental details that make the discipline so much fun for us (i.e. the instructors), but without being intrusive or detracting from the main ideas of the course material. For a class this size, it did require a lot of vigilance and time on our part, and it ought to be run by someone who is experienced with the material.