Post 344: How often should faculty participate in Forum Discussions?

Post 344: How often should faculty participate in forum discussions? How muich time should faculty spend on forum discussion?

How much time should faculty spend on forums each week?

According to Scott Warnock in his book, Writing Together, online faculty should spend no more than 3 hours on discussion forum participation per week because that would be equal to the 3 one hour lectures he gives per week in his face to face class.

Remember your face to face class has to have the same learning objectives as the online class. The online teacher has to spend just as much time teaching the online class as he does the face to face version of that same class.

When I was working online, we were migrating making our online classes the equivalent of that same class face to face. We had certain metrics on a time sheet where we would count how many hours we spend in the forums, how many pages students read in a class, how much time students spend doing homework or reading assignments and all these activities had to be the same as face to face students taking that same face to face 3 credit class.

By making our online classes the same as a 3 credit hour face to face class, then the school would be able to get accreditation. Without accreditation, then people would think that online school is not legitimate. We worked very hard on our time sheets to make sure our online classes were just the same as face to face 3 hour credit classes.

How often should faculty participate in the forums?

Scott Warnock says that students should post 1:4. In other words, you post one time for every four students. The idea is the teacher should not dominate the forum conversation, the teacher is only supposed to be the guide. Teachers have to let students dominate the conversation so students can construct their own knowledge and be the masters of their own knowledge.

In the online schools I worked at, the rule to follow is this, if the class has less than 10 students, then you answer each and every student post. If the class has more than 25 students, then you answer every other student. Make sure you answer different students each week. You have to keep track who you posted the week before, and who you skipped, then the next week, you post to those students you skipped the week before.

I will go over how I grade forums in a time efficient manner in a future blog post :)