The winter storm this week forced some changes in the way my class was conducted Wednesday. Although Indiana University did not cancel the afternoon classes, the weather was still quite nasty. Snow covering ice makes for a lot of treacherous sidewalks. My dilemma was a course structure that makes any missed classes a logistical nightmare to make up.
Our Wednesday classes are split into three sections of about 40 students. They discuss the week’s design assignment in great detail and then promote two students from each group to present a final version of the project the following Monday. Without this middle step, the public critique—already a challenge in a class of 120—loses meaning.
The compromise was to conduct our practice sessions virtually.
The Prep
Pity my associate instructors: there wasn’t any prep. We briefly discussed the weather conditions and made this decision just two hours before class. While they are all tech savvy enough to have participated in computer-mediated discussions, it is a different matter to try to run a discussion session with that many students. I gave them some suggestions and high-level goals, and left it to them to shape the experience how they thought best.
Finding a platform was tricky. After experimenting with Zoho (not enough platform crossover) and Meebo (difficult to invite outside of your contact list), we stuck to OnCourse’s chat room. This lowered the initial participation barriers considerably, since everyone knew where to go and already had accounts. This tool wasn’t ideal, but it was surprisingly well-suited to our purpose. OnCourse also offered easy access to files the instructors would share and the class wiki we wanted them to use.
Varied Strategies
All three sections had different experiences. In one, the instructor was very structured, essentially applying the in-person class process to the chat room. Each student was asked to write and post a short explanation for everyone to read as they followed along the same PDF file. They voted on their two favorites, and then spent the remaining time (about 15 minutes) discussing those two.
In the other two, the bulk of the time was spent helping students to edit and interact with the wiki. They guided students in how to add a summary of their projects to a new page, and then comment on the projects others had posted. After that was done, they asked some questions to spark discussion, with mixed success.
The voting methods differed, too. One collected votes via email, and the others used a surveymonkey poll. The latter sections had their winners immediately, while the email method required a larger window to collect and process.
Observations About Content
Here are two sample posts of interest from the chat rooms:
I’m not sure how the wiki works…I’ve been trying to post my script but it never seems to register…any tips?
What made this process fulfilling was that students both asked and answered questions like this. Successful first-hand experience with bigger tasks—like troubleshooting a wiki post—and smaller things (e.g., “where is the survey monkey link?“) turned into a peer network. In a formal class setting, the instructor tends to be the target and source of such information.
Which space should we post our scripts? Comfort Spaces or Comfort Control Systems or Both?
Semantics and order are two things that are always in flux in a wiki. They are a response to what members of the community feel are appropriate, and those who disagree are free to attempt to make their corrections to voice their preferences. The above question is one I hope is part of the process of interacting with our course wiki, and a form of critical thinking that is vital to success as a designer. Even as I recognize that this question was meant to be procedural (i.e., what is the right way to do the next thing?), we want these students to get good at critiquing both the artifacts of design and the motivations for why it should be in the world in the first place.
It would be great if we can have similar discussion in the class.
I learned a few things about where these students are in the process of becoming designers, some of which I intend to consciously bring into the Monday sessions. I don’t have the luxury or the logistical speed to get to three different physical locations (the norm for our Wednesday sessions) and get a pulse of the class. While I rely instead on my instructors to pass that information along, some of the things I found enlightening may not make their radar. I need to make a point, as one of the other instructors did, of reassuring everyone about the nature of critique (“Even when you all do your best, a bunch of people will still find fault in your work.”) and the work that is valued in this course. I also need to continue to iterate on the way in which our public critiques are held. There is never enough time, but I can do different things with the time I do have.
Issues
OnCourse may have met several needs for us this week—most notably, an archived chat discussion and low barrier to entry—but the system also had its flaws. Having 120 people (well, probably closer to 60 after we factor in attendance and the one section that didn’t mess with the wiki at all) try to edit the same page in a wiki causes a lot of confusion. Students edited a page only to find their links overwritten. To a lesser degree, file downloads and even use of the chat room suffered somewhat from heavy use of the same resources.
There is also no mechanism for small group discussion. The chat room is more like a single-topic forum, where every post is part of the same thread. Some of the in-person sections had been breaking up their 40 students into smaller groups to let more project get attention. Related: the scroll position would automatically jump to the latest post. That made the multiple conversations and sidebars difficult to follow, especially if the posts came quickly. Readability was difficult with a large active group, which is exactly what we wanted to facilitate online.
Finally, there is a definite need to properly prep instructors about strategy. Even little things like how questions are worded came make a big difference in the level of engagement. “Anyone want to talk about what patterns do you see?” can be answered with a simple yes or no. “What patterns did you see in these concepts?” at least forces the respondent to articulate an insight. If questions are left unanswered, the experience suffers. Those things are correctable with more lead time.
Lessons Learned and Other Benefits
In an online class, one important element is to clearly define the collaborative task at hand. If it isn’t clear why the chat is being used, there isn’t a reason to invest in its success. In one session, the task was a chat version of the regular class (present designs, vote, and discuss). In the other sections, it was to individually post wiki content and comments, and then vote on a favorite. The chat room has a different kind of supportive function in both circumstances, as it would if the task were something completely different.
If I were to run one of these myself, having lurked on the online sessions yesterday, I would …
- … give the attendance credit by asking them to do some task or series of small tasks that they could only get from the room. It is the same mechanism kidnappers use on their victims in movies, having them run from payphone to payphone and dropping the bag of cash in a particular trash can. If it is separate from the learning tasks (e.g., the wiki work and discussion) then it is easier to get involvement all around.
- … assign the legwork ahead of time. Imagine if everyone had already created their wiki page, and the entire time could have been spent in discussion. The OnCourse servers would have appreciated that, certainly.
- … take advantage of the online format. Having everyone in the same room has its advantages, but access to other information on the web and empowering people who wouldn’t ever speak in a class with 78 eyes looking at them are not among the benefits. Use the chat for focused critique with the larger group, and let other forums—like the comment thread on wiki pages—be used to facilitate small group discussion.
A big perk for this storm-induced switch to online is that we got to deviate from our stated protocols. I didn’t require anyone to post to the wiki as part of their grade, and as a result we’ve had only a handful share their work in that form. With the online session, it was appropriate to make that part of the requirement for attendance. Everyone who participated now has at least the minimum exposure to creating pages, which makes it more likely we’ll get online content in the future.