The following activities are intended to take place in the newsgroup:
Moreover, the major part of the discussion is intended to be self-perpetuating. This means that the students themselves will keep the discussion alive with no interference from the subject teacher. We believe this is viable because the students have widely different backgrounds and experiences and thus should be able to "help each other out".
Always remember that discussion groups in principle are open and that others may read them, even posting messages, answers etc. Actually, in some respects it could be hoped that the discussion could be extended in this way.
The figure above shows the newsgroup for this subject. The news
reader used in the figure shows "threads" in the discussions,
using indentations to display answers to news articles.
Sadly, the experience we have had with discussion groups is only fair. Discussions do not take off on their own. The teacher must be very active initially, to the point of playing devil's advocate (??!) to get discussions rolling. While this might prod some students to respond, the majority sadly remains silent.
Nevertheless, one of the permissible "smart tricks" is to start with a news article which is not very demanding, like this:
Hello, everybody. This is your teacher on the air again. Today, Trondheim has chilly weather, only 2-3º above and raining. How is the weather where you are?
Happily my tax returns were sent in time this year too. I was able to send the simplified version this year, so that was easy enough. Quick calculations tell me that unfortunately I will owe 3-4000 kroner in back taxes.
How is life where you are? Where are you, anyway? How did you find out about the NITOL courses?
This type of news article is easy to respond to for more or less
anybody without putting too much work into it. The important thing
is to get the students on the air for the first time. From there
you can ease the discussion round to more subject- and course-oriented
issues.
I assume that our observations in this respect correspond to the classroom. Only a number of students will dare to raise their voices. The others merely listen or start talking after class (this option also exists in distance teaching as students may send e-mail).
Below I have listed some possible causes for a lack of participation:
Admittedly newsgroup discussions may be tougher than a regular classroom discussion. In the classroom something "stupid" is only spoken, and will be probably be forgotten after class. A news article is written and may in some cases be left on the news server for months. I believe that many people refrain from participating in the discussions for precisely this reason. An underlying assumption when writing something is that it has been thought through before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), so for this reason, when you make a mistake, you feel it is twice as bad.
Students make good use of e-mail to take up things with their
teacher and to ask questions. They use e-mail because they do
not dare use the newsgroups.
If the question touches on something which could be of interest for several students you should put it on the newsgroups. But you must ensure that the message is anonymous. This means that the message must be entered in the newsgroup by the teacher and that the identity of the student cannot be discerned from it.
Then it is simply a matter of waiting for reactions and replies
from the other students. If you do not receive the needed answer,
you the teacher must supply the proper answer.
6.4 Using E-mail for teacher-student contact
The students are good at using e-mail. They make contact and ask about various things quite often. This is of course excellent in many ways, but there are some drawbacks as well:
However, this is not easy! We cannot reject e-mail either, it has to be answered in the appropriate manner. When student groups are big, as is often the case with open learning systems, massive amounts of e-mail may nevertheless become a problem.