Reflection Journal: Eight Ways to Get Students More Engaged in On-line Conferences

As I read this article, I found myself agreeing strongly with what the author presented through out his study regarding the problem of student “lurkers” and how teachers should manage them effectively.

Online conferences provide students with new or more opportunities to become actively involved in discussions which also enable the teachers to identify problem areas of individual students. The author strongly pointed out that the teachers should not tolerate the problems of passivity of the learners.

In order to prevent the students from “lurking”, the author presents the following eight solutions;

1. learners of all ages need some pushing from the teachers. Participation should be mandatory to some extent-compulsory posting of writing on given topic related to final grades will ensure students to become engaged in the process.

2. instead of leaving learning responsibility upon each individual learner, organizing learning teams may enhance collaborative learning outside the classroom. Not only would the students learn to work in teams but they would also have stronger incentives to become more actively engaged.

3. teachers need to create materials that the learners would perceive to be interesting, valid, practical and important.

4. following the theory that the learners should always be pushed to thrive for more, they should be asked to produce more substantial input (opinions plus supporting details).

5. in addition to the third suggestion, teachers should provide well structured activities that are “academically meaningful” to students. Topics chosen for the tasks should correlate to the course objectives and should challenge the students to acquire the necessary skills and strategies for learning.

6. requiring students to “integrate, synthesize, and apply information” by submitting written assignment would allow them to experience each stage of writing process on top of participating in interactive idea/opinion sharing steps.

7. teachers should have clear set standard of course requirements and should intervene when necessary to guide students to reach the target goals. Teacher-participation is essential (for conferencing, providing feedback and encouragement, etc.) to ensure student-participation.

8. effectiveness of peer-grading seems to be split in the middle where for some this system may offer strong incentives to perform better but in some cases may cause some problems of biased grading.

Throughout my own experience of teaching, I encountered numerous cases where making tasks mandatory worked more effectively for overall learning procedures.