I use a rubric for evaluating discussion boards, but it is challenging.
Initially when I started teaching online, I asked a colleague how they did it and they
had a counting mechanism.
And because I didn't know anything coming in, just the K-12 experience that I had, I
attempted to use that the first year.
And what he did was he looked at the monitoring system - and this worked well for him - he
looked at the monitoring system they had and he counted how many times people went online
and how many times they contributed and then he had a system for the meaningfulness of
that comment and, yes, subjective.
But all assessment is subjective, really, because you are choosing what you're assessing,
there's subjectivity in everything, but that's what he used.
I used it the first year and it worked, but I struggled with it in that I couldn't get
it to blend with our university grading standards, with our ... the practices we use here.
So I did a bit of a search.
I searched and I found something from Professor Tyler from Brown University and what he developed
was a mechanism for mostly the quality of the posts saying overall if this student wasn't
part of a class, the learning would have been greatly reduced or, you know ... and he had
a like-hurt scale for that.
So, I used that and now with the suggestion of some great people that I know, I'm taking
that same system and incorporating it with the University of Saskatchewan grading standards
and developing a rubric for that, which I think is a brilliant way to go.
I'm just not done yet, but I'll be done for the fall.
So, it's just taking what quality contributions would be and using our U of S grading standards
in terms of having insight or having an exceptional style or a good seller or whatever it is that
they needed to have and then putting it on a rubric system so students know clearly ahead
of time what they need to do.
I do provide a rubric upfront, a couple of them that will evaluate or provide guidelines
for kinds of online discussion that we would be expecting and I communicate that to students
early on and I provide an opportunity for them toward the end of the class to do a self-evaluation
so they can look back on their own participation and make a judgement in terms of, again, according
to a rubric or any other measure and we negotiate a grade around that.
The other opportunity in terms of evaluating online discussion boards is that the metrics
that are available within a learning management system in particular are quite extensive,
so I can pull data and do comparative analyses between students, between discussion group
areas, and, you know, present that data to students and it's very clear - at least according
to some metrics such as frequency, length of posts, etc - where you stand or what your
profile looks like across the entire course.
So, I guess I say there are quantitative and qualitative methods available in order to
evaluate online discussion.
For me, it's more wine-tasting, it's a combination between wine-tasting and metrics, alright.
I do look at the number of times people have engaged, I look at those stats.
They're readily available, they're too seductive: I can't not look at them.
And I've been surprised.
I've gone online and I've looked and I thought that someone who was really deeply engaged
wasn't as engaged as I thought, when you look at the stats.
Like, wow, look at that.
They only went online maybe thirty times during the course or, I mean, in a discussion board,
they only posted that number of times and responses.
Whereas other people would be way, way more active.
Don't usually miss them.
But, I can't leave it at that because, often, most often, I'll get my real sense of what
was going on in a discussion board from going back and reliving it.
So I will compile everything in a discussion board, usually one discussion after another,
but I'll compile each discussion first post to last post.
And I won't read them in detail, but I'll start saying okay, there was this individual.
Let me track how they were engaged in the conversation, let me see the evidence of the
learning.
And often I am relived at that point because that person who wasn't numerically as engaged
might have been deeply engaged cognitively and you can see it.
You can see it, it comes out.
But it's wine-tasting.
I mean, I'm saying oh, that person is a merlot and I expect these kinds of nuances and that
person was a chardonnay and it was an oaky chardonnay.
So, that one feels a completely different way to me, but both of them were making a
legitimate stretches to learn and if I'm not willing to do that - well, I guess what I'm
saying is I'm unapologetically objective about it.
And in the end, I try to be generous to, because acknowledging that whatever we're looking
at is an artifact of learning and that there was the potential for other kinds of learning
going on underneath or behind the curtain that we can't see.
And so I want to be generous about that and I want to acknowledge that there are certain
kinds of learning that I'll just never know whether they were there or not and so I'll
add that little generosity factor into my unapologetically subjective approach to assessing
online learning - or discussion boards particularly.