Melissa's Musings

The emphasis on engaging students in an online course through discussion has me questioning whether or not online is the appropriate format for most mathematics courses. One of the themes of Bolt 101 has been about how to make an online course more than just a correspondence course. It seems like the most natural format for having students engage with each other is to have them first engage with the content and then to engage with each other via discussion about the content. However, 'discussion' in my courses often looks more like collaborative problem solving and that's enough of a difference that I am struggling with figuring out how to translate it to an online setting. In my face to face courses, this collaborative problem solving usually takes place when students are first interacting with content and there's not a lot of (formal) discussion after they've solved the problem. Ideally, I'd like to mimic this and have students work through lessons together ...

One of the things that I continually struggle with is when and how to communicate expectations regarding assessments and learning outcomes to students. On one hand, how can students possibly do what we expect them to do, if you don't tell them what to do? On the other hand, giving too many details too often can be overwhelming and counterproductive. When I first started teaching, I completely failed to do this in any capacity. I gave students no framing regarding what the learning goal of any given assignment was and just assumed they would figure it out based on what happened in class that day. I now spend a few minutes at the beginning and end of each class telling students what the learning goal of the lesson is, however I don't have them any sort of tangible reference for this. The reading in Chapter 3 of Conquering the Content (in particular the box on page 61 where it discusses the audiences and functions of a learning guide) made me realize that a learning guide may ...