On-line forums and seminars

Introduction

Seminars are an essential part of the learning process for many students at the University. They provide an opportunity for the students to engage the tutor and their peers directly. They are unique in that sense, to deepen their understanding of key issues in a given module.

Or the student and the tutor the seminar presents opportunities and challenges.

How best can you ensure that students are intellectually engaged, how can you best ensure that students are prepared to take advantage of the learning opportunity.How can you balance the interests of the vocal and socially confident students with the shyer and quieter ones. In what ways can seminars be made more interactive and discussions deeper and more wide ranging.

My own experience and that of colleagues at the School of History suggest that Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) such as WebCT or Nathan Bodington can substantially improve the experience of learning and teaching in seminars.

The module workspace

So what do we do in the School of History? We have some modules taught almost entirely on-line. We have many people who only upload module documentation but what I want to focus on here is the use of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in seminars.

So basically for this what we do is to set up a site on the Virtual Learning Environment that is dedicated to the module....

On-line forum

...and then for each seminar in a series set-up a separate room which allows students to upload 100 word essays in answer to a single question and for those to be due one or two days before the seminar.

That gives the tutor the opportunity to mark the work and for students more importantly to have a chance to read other peoples' submissions.

Now in getting students to write these 100 word essays in advance of the seminar we have found that there are great benefits both to the students and to the tutors.

Benefits for the students

So for example for the students they get continuous feedback on their work and that is particularly important in a module where for example students typically will submit a single essay towards the end of a module and they won't know how they are doing till the very end.

So in this case throughout the module they are getting feedback.

In our department these Nathan Bodington (VLE) contributions are often… one of their appeals is as an alternative to oral presentations.

Now for the students many of them find the oral presentation very stressful and a lot of students when a seminar starts with two or three presentations as you will get in a group of 15.

They will consider the time spent listening to other students' presentations as time wasted. In this case really everybody is giving a presentation and that presentation is given before the class starts, so you can launch straight into the discussion. So there is no, in that sense, time wasted with student presentations.

Perhaps the biggest advantage for the students though is that it forces them to be prepared in advance of the tutorial so students already have formed ideas that they want to bring to the tutorial.

They can see the quality of one another's ideas and particularly for the shy students, for the ones who are inclined to devalue their own contributions. They can see the quality of their ideas as compared to the ideas of their peers.

In turn when students get feedback at the beginning of the session on their ideas it encourages oral participation. They already have had their ideas validated and they are more willing to bring those ideas to the seminar.

And then for the students one of the biggest advantages of this is that they put in all this work, is that they can use all of the essays for each of the given seminars as material for revision.

So what we have discovered is students put in a lot more effort than they normally do for these essays. That is it increases the amount of work they do for the seminars generally and it has noticeably increased the final grades. It has improved student performance.

And what is striking here is when they do all that extra work they are remarkably enthusiastic about it. They have embraced the Nathan Bodington (VLE) so they really see the benefits.

Benefits for the tutor

Now for the tutor there is also an appeal in the Nathan Bodington (VLE) being a substitute for time consuming oral presentations. There is more time to teach.

We have uniformly seen an improvement, a greater depth, more wide ranging discussion in our seminars.

The seminars tend to be more interactive and more wide ranging. We have noticed that there is a decline in the free rider, that is the student who comes not having prepared anything but seeking to benefit from the seminar discussion. They have to participate.

Shyer students are more inclined to participate which is a real benefit for us.

And in preparing for a given seminar, once you see how the students have answered the question, you can see what the students have understood better and what they have understood less well and you can tailor the discussion round developing the ideas they are weaker on.

And then of course as I mentioned the improved student results overall is a very big benefit and it is not without costs.

Costs

We should be frank about this...

If you have a group of 15 or 4 groups of 15 there are essays to mark.

Now personally I do not give detailed comments in these essays and students do not demand detailed comments. I will put a grade on the essay and a line or two just suggesting what they should think about, what they may not have thought about, what was good about the essay, what was bad about the essay, and they pick up the rest from the discussion itself.

So there are costs. There is time that has to be spent setting up the shell, managing the discussion rooms, but once you have set it up it is pretty easy to then to renew them year on year.

And the number of my colleagues in the School of History who are taking up this use of Nathan Bodington (VLE) for seminars suggests that there are real benefits that are perceived broadly when the costs are taken into consideration.