When I first received my French 100 and 101 classroom, I noticed that the students were writing mini-essays in the discussion forums, and were not really talking or interacting with each other in the forum. Aaron Johnson on his blog said it best, "Learning activities must go beyond discussion prompts to require exchanges between students. Discussion or project design will require students to reference and build upon the work of their peers. It’s not collaborative unless a significant element of their work is truly interdependent in nature."
Do not just design writing prompts that ask students to just write mini-essays where students can just write a mini essay in the forum and then leave. Aaron Johnson on his blog and in his book, Excellent Online Teaching.com, stresses the importance of Collaborative Design, that is designing forum assignments that gets students to come out of their shells and actually interact with each other.
Johnson says, that it is important to not just teach the subject matter, but to also teach students how to interact with each other, so they can learn the material on their own. I remember reading a Business Communication textbook for teaching my Business Writing and Etiquette class and it said that one of the skills employers want most are soft communication skills, that is the ability for the new employee to do teamwork, communicate clearly with others and have the ability to interact positively to get the project done without too much boss supervision.
If the online teacher can teach students to communicate well with each other, to build on the conversation of the previous forum post, then online teachers are teaching the very sought after soft communication skills employers are looking for in a new employee.
A boring writing prompt simply asks students to write about the subject matter without engaging the student to discuss with other students multiple perspectives of the topic and further the conversation in the forums. Here is an example of a boring writing prompt: The assignment writing prompt: Write about a famous French artist. Choose your favorite French artist and write 250 words about this artist.
Each student chose different French artists and cut and paste biographies they found on the web for the biographies. As I read each forum entry, all I was reading was a series of French artist biographies--mini-essay biographies with no conversation going on between forum posts among students.
One student wrote about the life of Monet and how Monet popularized Impressionism painting. Another student wrote about Renoir and his love of fat women. Another wrote about Degas and his love for Asian exotic subjects. None of the posts told me why these students chose these artists.
I redesigned the assignment to make it more conversational, to elicit role play, to motivate debate, to start students talking.
Redesigned assignment forum prompt: Write about a famous French artist. Tell why you chose this artist. Find a controversy or interesting facts that can promote conversation among students about your artist. End your forum post with an open-ended question to promote conversation. Do not just post a straight biography of the artist.
Examples of how you can stimulate conversation by asking these open-ended questions at the end of your forum post: Why do you think this artist's work still is popular today? If you could role play any artist featured in these forums, who would it be and why? If you could time travel and meet any of the artists featured in the forum, who would it be and why? After reading all the student posts about different French artists, which one is your favorite and why? You are each responsible for answering student posts to your thread.
By requiring students to make open-ended questions, then the students can promote conversation without you the teacher having to do all the heavy lifting to come up with open-ended questions to keep the conversation going.
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