One of my favorite (modified) sayings is:
"You can lead a student to material but you cant make them study"
This is the joy that I am having at the moment. Motivating first years to actually study is a lot harder than I thought. Today I looked at how many people are actually looking at the Discussion Board. This is used for all important messages to students (such as when assignments are released, general feedback, guidance, suggestions, etc). Most of these messages are not communicated in any other way.
The following image shows the number of accesses to the Discussion Board by student. There are about 80 students of which 45 have never accessed a single discussion board posting.
Evil plan 1: Make sure that I release much more help via the discussion board... :)
Evil plan 1 is going into action today when I am releasing the assignment... I told them it would be available this week and that I would announce it on the discussion board. Lets see how many actually paid attention in class... My bet is about 35 :)
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Students and Learning
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8 comments:
If you studied with me did you find the Discussion Board useful?
One day in and there is already a couple of posts in the Assignment 2 discussion board...
I generally like the discussion board, though for my .NET subjects I used the labs far more. In Enterprise .NET I lived in the lab and spent a lot of time in Mr Cain's office asking questions.
In my XML subject I answered a lot of questions. They were things that I could answer quite comfortably, and I was always on the net, so I could provide a quick response.
One of the biggest issues with students is that they leave things until the last minute. So the same questions will be asked again and again, without previous answers being read.
Discussion board is very handy for Enterprise .NET. I still wish you'd post announcements in the annoucements section like everyone else though. Then they get nicely aggregated on to the My.Swinburne feed...
- Xavier
Maybe I could post a "there is a new announcement" announcement (with the url). Would that be good?
i liked the discussion board when i was studying .net but i spent more time asking Andrew questions directly about 2 days after the assignment was handed out just out of pure panic. then those same qns were asked in the discussion board about 2 days before the assignment was due which always baffled me a bit (the lateness of the qns, not the qns themselves).
i must admit though, discussion boards are sorely underused in other subjects, by both lecturers and students. so i guess some students don't really get just how extensively they can be used. this would be especially so for first years.
the most interesting thing about the discussion boards was seeing how much other students "got" the assignment and the material.
I like said evil plan.
I used the discussion board all the time...i dont see how you could get by Advanced or Enterprise .NET without keeping up to date with the posts. I think sometimes they were more useful than the labs.
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