Interstudent transfer of experiences
With on-line courses becoming more popular, how do you encourage the inter-student exchanges that happens freely (and at times spiritly) in a traditional classroom setting to occur in on-line courses?
What techniques and styles have been found to be successful in allowing the student to learn more than the course content and learn from the fellow student experiences (the how-to-apply the course concepts in the real world)?
Herschel:
I have not encountered any situations in which courses provide for learning beyond the content domain driven by the learning objectives. Online learning is driven by completion times especially when peer evaluation is involved; so the opportunity to engage in completing additional course work is not considerd to be practical. Moreover, going beyond the course content domain means the addition of a significant amount of work for Instructors. Students may seek references to supplementary content from Instructors; however, I would not recommend that the Instructors be responsible for providing support to this additional content.
Learning from other student can also be problematic because each student is friven to complete the course load within a specific period of time. Instructors may tailor assignments to enable students to share work-related experience. This is as far as I have seen it gone. I have never seen students volunteering sharing work experiences.
Perhaps other students in this course may have other experiencews to share with us.
Satrohan
I find it interesting that you feel the need to explore ways to increase student to student interaction. If anything, in the classes that I teach I have the opposite problem. The students can tend to get a little to chatty about personal issues and stray away from the topic at hand. It is possible that this occurs because many of the prompts are designed to encourage students to share personal experiences. I like this approach because it brings the learning process a little bit closer to their personal lives. If students are reluctant to share real stories of their own lives, I tell them that it is perfectly alright to use second hand or fabricated stories to illustrate what point they are trying to make.
Clayton:
It is quite common for studentsto deviate from the Discussion thread. Advising them up-front to ensure that their contributions are relevant to the Discussion thread may solve the problem. If some students continue to deviate, you can advise them that if they continue, you will drop them from the Discussion thread, and follow suit.
Fabricated stories with the qualifier you have stipulated are excellent alternatives. Some of us, including myself, have personal experiences we want to keep private.
Satrohan
