Providing Rockbridge Seminary students with learning tips, ministry resources, and course upgrade news
How many forums should Rockbridge Seminary classes have in each unit? That’s a question we’ve worked at answering since moving to the new online classroom over a year ago.
As you know, the Rockbridge Seminary learning design emphasizes a vibrant, highly interactive learning community using an asynchronous format. Participation in the forums is not an add-on learning exercise to check-off but an essential element to creating a successful online learning experience. Finding the right number of forums for the new online classroom structure was important.
If you took a class around a year ago, you may have had 4 forums in a unit. Whoa, did we get feedback on that!! 4 was backed off to 3, but it still seemed too many. Most units now have only 2 forums. For now, 2 forums appear to be a sufficient number to build a learning community. One student writing on a course evaluation several terms back suggested we go to just 1 forum. Our thinking at this time is that 1 forum is not sufficient.
We hope the fewer number of forums will give additional margin to interact when appropriate with the professor in the Professor Connect Forum now found at the end of each unit.
Over the next two terms, each unit will receive an additional forum called the Student Connect Forum. Here are the forum instructions:
Share unit-related thoughts, ideas, and comments with fellow students in this OPTIONAL open thread. Student connect postings are not eligible for points.
One more change we made based on evaluation feedback. The “graded” forums in Unit 8 (the final unit) were pulled and replaced with a single optional forum.
In summary, by the May Term course units will typically have 2 student forum, 1 Prof Connect forum, and 1 Student Connect forum. Unit 8 will contain only an optional forum.
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mark said...
February 9, 2009
I’ve found the two forums per unit to be very manageable. Three was sometimes difficult to keep up with, especially remembering which ones I had responded to.
I have found that very few people use the Student Lounge forum. I think this may be because there is no indication that there is a post there, unless you subscribe to that forum. I think these would be used more frequently if you automatically subscribed students to email updates for these forums.
Mark