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March 09, 2007
Using an On Line Forum for Student Participation
Yesterday I talked with Professor James Sager of Cal State University / Chico. Professor Sager teaches intro to MIS to sections of three to four hundred students. He wants class participation, but realizes that many students will be intimated by such a large group. So, instead, he requires the students to participate in online forums. As he explains here, the students earn 15% of their grade based on their forum participation. You can see the forum itself here.
I asked him if grading participation for so many students is a problem and he explained that he's written software to compute students' scores:
"At present I give students 12 points for each original posting (new thread) and 4 points for each of their reviews/rating of their peers postings. In total, they can earn 148 points which amounts for roughly 15% of their grade in the course. The forum software that I use is based on an open-source product called JForum (http://www.jforum.net/). I've modified the base software in a couple of important respects and it should probably be modified even further to make it a better facility for classroom use (I can think of a couple of annoyances that I'd love to resolve). Also, my version is based on a slightly older release than the current 2.1.7 product. For grading, I wrote a servlet that interrogates the JForum database and calculates students' point totals automatically. I started to do the job manually once and quickly realized that I could write the software and do the job automatically before I would finish the job looking at the data by hand.
"Sometime in the future, I'd like to explore creating a "Semantic Forum" that would use Latent Semantic Analysis technology (paper here) to analyze student postings real-time and disallow postings that are off topic or trivial. Currently, I use simple minimum word requirements in scoring. I don't have any automated content analysis, but a posting such as "I Agree" doesn't count in a student's point total.
"My current grading scheme takes into account peer reviews but doesn't incorporate an instructor-based quality assessment. That would be another use for LSA - i.e. generating a automated relevance score. It wouldn't be as reliable as instructor evaluation, but it would at least be manageable. Without an automated scheme, using a forum for a couple hundred students would be an absolute nightmare. The more of the teaching drudgery that I can automate the better. That way I get to concentrate on the fun stuff."Oh yes, the reason that I chose JForum were (1) it's open source and (2) it's written primarily in Java. Because we teach our programming classes in the MIS program in Java, and because I'm therefore fairly familiar with that language, I'm able to tweak the software to my requirements without an undue amount of pain."I have some additional rationale for using the forum, much of which is outlined in an old internal research grant proposal from a couple of years ago. See the attachment (here). Unfortunately, the research wasn't funded, but I went ahead and put something together anyway. I especially like the peer review aspect of the forum requirement because it absolves me from being the sole source of feedback in the course. Anyway, you may also share the grant document if you like. I do have a current research project concerning forum use for which I have collected student survey data, but I don't think any of the language in that proposal is particularly proprietary
"At Chico State, we use WebCT Vista as the campus course management system and there is a forum facility built into the latest Vista version. I haven't yet explored its features, but I have that on my agenda for a slow day (the kind of day that rarely seems to come my way). Meanwhile, I'll probably keep using my JForum-based system, in part because it is very much like other online forums that students might encounter on the Web."
I found this fascinating. The automated grading aspects would pertain to online courses as well, maybe even better. You can contact Jim at: JSager1@csuchico.edu
Posted by DavidK at March 9, 2007 12:24 PM | Permalink