Google Docs and the Lonely Craft of Writing

Technology in Pedagogy, No. 3, May 2011
Written by Kiruthika Ragupathi

It has been widely acknowledged that the use of collaborative technologies increases students’ engagement with the content and enhances their learning process. By using Google Docs, instructors can better understand students’ thinking process and can help them learn to write in often different and sophisticated ways, says Eleanor Wong, an Associate Professor of Law and the Director of the Legal Skills Programme at the National University of Singapore.  She is in charge of developing the skills component in the Law faculty – the task of getting students to analyse, reason, research for themselves and finally be able to communicate in a cogent and clear way. She teaches courses on Legal Skills, and specifically the module on “Legal Analysis Writing and Research”. 

In this session, A/P Wong shared her experience with using Google Docs over the past three years in teaching persuasive writing to law students. She explained that she wanted to examine whether the learning skills – the positive ones – that students develop were achieved through the correct process of thinking and reasoning.
 

Teaching skills of analysis and communication

The current situation

The law faculty uses interactive classes to enhance the learning skills of students. These classes are geared towards students who are open to speaking up. Instructors intervene at appropriate times to give feedback to their students. However, this was not the case with writing assignments. Traditionally, writing is a solitary work and can be an intimidating and a harrowing experience. Hence, it is rather tough to get into the students mind while they are writing and to understand what’s going in their mind.

Written assignments have the following limitations due its nature and format:

  • Format: The format of an assignment allows instructors to see the result or the final work but not the students’ thought process or the drafting process.
  • Feedback: Feedback given to students for written work is very often a balance between timeliness and detail. Feedback provided may either be timely but not detailed, or detailed but not in time for students to improve on their work.
  • Assessment: Assessment given is a bit more summative that formative. Due to the long time lag between the assignment been given and detailed feedback coming back, there is not much time left for the students to improve on their work.

Hence, these constraints on written assignments are not as good for teaching skills as one would like. Ideally, an activity that tests substance as well as excavating process (format), whether feedback is timely and detailed, and an assessment that is both summative and formative are the most necessary aspects when teaching skills. In the field of Law, the quintessential model to achieve this is the moot court. Instructors will be able to intervene and help students to think by asking the “What If” questions, giving students the opportunity to respond, rephrase their arguments. Even in terms of argument style, feedback on hand gestures or voice control could be provided on the spot.

Selection of an appropriate tool

A/P Wong was aspiring towards this kind of model – “helping students to learn writing” as well. She wants her students to think about the process of writing and break the act down into simpler steps to demystify it. Though she feels that using Google Docs is not 100% similar to the moot court model, it is the nearest approximation. Before moving on to Google Docs, she tried out the following activities to improve student-writing skills:

  • One-on-One conference: Students submit their assignments. She then sets up a one-on-one conference to provide customised feedback on specific issues and problems that her students face. Though this platform enabled her students to understand the problems in the assignment, feedback given is not timely enough as students were unable to recall what they did and thought at the time of writing. She also realised that it is difficult to make this type of activity an open learning process.
  • Mahjong Paper: She gets her students to write their analyses on sheets of mahjong paper in class and displays to the entire class. In this activity, the feedback is timely but the result of the draft is not in its final form. It generates good discussion and gets students well prepared to explain their written position orally. However, this activity does not enable the instructor to understand the students’ thought process.
  • Using IVLE: The IVLE platform is used to get students to submit their arguments. Based on the submission, A/P Wong will highlight good arguments to the class.
  • Google Docs: Google Docs is an online platform that allows her students to work easily on their documents allowing her to share documents with the class. It supports synchronous editing and comment writing, and saves versions of the document – options that are necessary for real-time collaborative learning.

Framework for exploring the collaborative writing process using Google Docs

A/P Wong chose to use Google Docs as it allows her students to work easily on their documents using a web browser. Each student would need a Gmail account (which can be obtained from Google free of charge) to access the application.

She created a folder for her tutorial class and shared the folder with the group. She then uploaded a “clean sample” of the objective memorandum on a topic that the class had worked on earlier during the semester. Students work in pairs, with each pair working on a clean sample in class. The activity was designed to be interactive and required students to rephrase and convert an objective memorandum into a persuasive argument.

During the activity, she suddenly realised that her tutorial classes became very quiet from the usual interactive session and the only discussion that was happening was between the teammates working in pairs. However, when she shifted her attention to the documents in the Google Docs folder, there was a flurry of activity with students working on counter arguments. Some teams rightly analysed the facts and reasons, reframed the arguments into persuasive ones and peppered it with punchy headings. She was able to make comments in a timely fashion as students were rephrasing their drafts and pay specific attention to individual teams. Students felt encouraged and motivated to improve on their writing with the constructive feedback (timely) given by the instructor.

This activity engages students, requiring them to attend to feedback and allows them to redraft on the spot (formative). After teams responded to her feedback, she pulled out the work of a group who had organised their arguments well and then displayed it for the entire class to see. This allowed teams to see each other’s drafting process and enabled them to follow suit and work towards making their arguments better.

Take away points from the activity:

  • It was easy for instructors to toggle between students’ work allowing the instructor and students’ to access the documents simultaneously
  • Instructors can see what students’ were writing and the thinking process involved
  • Instructors can choose when to intervene and provide constructive feedback to individual students
  • Highlight a good or bad model and allow students to keep an eye on the modeled work
  • The writing process that is a “closed” and “solitary” now becomes exposed to everyone allowing other students to benefit

An important phenomenon to note is that the organisational insights pointed out in class was quickly adopted by other students prompting them to reorganise their documents. This activity is not only a good way to combine the interaction and group thinking of the students but also to allow students the needed privacy to write on their own. The instructor is able to see the thinking process.

Q & A Session

Following the presentation by A/P Wong, a lively discussion with a Q & A session followed. Listed below are some questions from the session.

Q:  Elaborate on the required length of the essay.
EW: In the first half of the semester, students are involved in drafting arguments, with a number of face-to-face interaction or one-on-one conference with the instructors, and through intensive research. Students are by then comfortable in preparing documents that are of 2000-word in length, and are ready to write an essay of up to 3000 words. This is the point when I know that my students are ready for this type of collaborative writing exercise. My students feel comfortable when I intervene with feedback and criticise their thinking process. So, I usually reserve this activity for the latter part of the year.
Q:  Do you explore and analyse your students’ thought process at a later stage?
EW: I have not attempted that. Writing does not happen as quickly as it happens like in talking. The changes happen quite slowly. I only have six teams at a time and hold this activity at a time when I roughly know my students better. The comments that I give would need to be timely and will improve their writing process. 
Q:  You mentioned that you monitor students’ thinking process. Do you also grade the process?
EW: I have not used it for grading as that is not my primary objective.  I would like to understand my students’ thinking process and based on that, I take every opportunity to provide feedback. I will comment on what they did not get right and how they can modify to write better.
Q: What is the feedback from your students? Did you have difficulties getting your students to subscribe to this activity?
EW: Sometimes students encounter technical problems, for example some students had problems with wireless connectivity in the seminar rooms. Otherwise students were happy with the activity. Three years back, it was tough, not all students had Gmail accounts and it took a long time to set up and get everyone on board. But, during the last two years, students had Gmail accounts and were already working in groups. To make the process easier and smoother, this year I used Google Docs as the platform for some of the initial student assignments. Some students are non-talkative writers. Top students are forthcoming in face-to-face classes and these students would not write or modify anything in their documents until they have mulled over, discussed and debated on issues they would want to change. Then there are students who are talkative writers. They quickly understand the facts and are usually way ahead in this activity but are typically quiet in class.
Q: Do you do this activity only during class?
EW: Yes, I have primarily used it during the class as I can understand the process that happens. However, some of my other colleagues have assigned it earlier, and have noticed that some students start working on the documents and make the changes before the tutorial class. 
Q: Students are able to see each other’s work. Do they then comment on their peers’ work?
EW: Yes, students do comment on their peer’s work. During previous lessons, a number of discussions happen, and students are used to each other’s ideas and expressions. You might need to moderate if you have not taught the etiquette of commenting in your classes. In general, students behave well when providing comments. 
Q: I would assume that this activity is a type of active learning that you employ.
EW: Yes, you can consider it as a form of active learning. Students are writing and making counter arguments (DOING) while discovering the process and applying information that they get from their discussion, from the instructor and their peers. This activity focuses on developing students’ writing skills and involves higher-order thinking skills like analysis and synthesis.
Q: Do you allow your students to flag when they are ready to receive feedback on their changes?
EW: That is a very good point but I have not looked into that issue. Since I know my students, I would roughly know when they are ready, for example, on a paragraph or a sentence. When they move away to work on other paragraphs and sentences, then that would be an indication that the required changes are complete. Since students are working in pairs, they usually move on to other parts when they have agreed upon the changes made. However, your suggestion is good, as it will make the process more systematic. I could inform my students to highlight the parts in “yellow” when they are ready to for feedback on those sections.
Q: Do you do this process in stages?
EW: Yes, I do work in stages. We must understand that when students speak, they need to deliver the information sequentially, but when they write, it allows them to decide on what to change and in any order that they wish. However, when I discuss and comment, I use stages. For example stages in the process would be:

  1. Organisation – the headings, the signposts
  2. Language – sometimes even exact expression
  3. Technical issues – citation formats
Q: How do you deal with – when and how often to interrupt the students during the class?
EW: I do not interrupt or intervene often. I usually bring up only 3 to 4 points in a class. I will showcase one good model during a class. 
Q: Do you need prompts to guide the discussion?
EW: No, not for this class, mainly because I know the students well enough. In early sessions, it will be low energy, where students will be looking at their own work. The key issue here is to “know your students well and make sure they know each other well”. 
Q: How often does Google save versions? When you have a completed document, do you check to see the number of versions saved?
EW: Yes, Google does save versions. Since I do not use it for assessment, I have not tracked these versions and analysed them. However, I am sure Google offers the possibility to check out the saved versions for analysis. 

Lunchtime Guide to Student Blogging

Technology in Pedagogy, No. 2, April 2011
Written by Kiruthika Ragupathi

Anand Ramchand, an Instructor from the Department of Information Systems shared his experience in getting his students to use blogs. He started the session with a brief introduction to blogs, explaining how blogs are a special instance of a website with a log of regular updates listed in reverse chronology, and the ease with which they can be published and accessed. He indicated the interaction in the form of comments differentiated blogs from other platforms.

 Blogs for Reflective Learning

In the year 2010, Anand used blogs as a tool to foster reflective learning in his students taking the freshmen module titled “Computing & Society”. The module’s primary focus was on the ethical, social and legal implications in the use of information technology. The objectives of this module were to get students (who are being educated in computing) to be sensitized to and evaluate the ethical issuses involved in technology design, development and use, and to get them to explore the world of IT as technology professionals rather than users.

Based on feedback from previous semesters, he understood that though students learn and become aware of issues related to ethics, they did not form deep and meaningful opinions about the issues. Hence to help his students get actively engaged in deeper thought processes, Anand identified the need for student reflection. He believed that would facilitate his students to draw out personal experiences and assumptions in evaluating ethical dilemmas.

He narrowed down to using blogs, in particular the Blog.NUS platform, after considering a range of tools that were available – concept maps, essays, discussion forums, and wikis. This NUS platform provided an official environment, setting clear boundaries within which students could blog and operate based on NUS IT policies.

His class had 170 students, and hence he resorted to group blogging with 3 to 4 students per group (a total of 44 groups). Each student in a group was required to make 4 posts at regular intervals during the semester. He assigned 10% of the grade to the group blog, and students’ contributions of comments on other blog posts were a component of their class participation score (which accounted for another 10% of their grades). Some groups’ posts spanned a wide umbrella of topics while other groups were more focused in their blogging. To jockey for visibility, groups also got creative, controversial and used various forms of multimedia in their blogs.

Pedagogical Advantages that Blogs Offer

Anand highlighted the following features that prompted him to use blogs for his module:

  1. Knowledge construction is aided with social interaction
    For students to develop knowledge, they need social interaction. Blogs permit collaboration, and allow students to debate and discuss issues positively, facilitating the social construction of knowledge. In case of forums, students tend to write their opinions and comments briefly, and sometimes only when prompted, while blogging allows students to create a more comprehensive commentary on a regular basis. The action of writing this commentary and subsequent interaction around it foster sense making and knowledge construction in students.
  2. Personal ownership over thoughts and understanding promotes better effort
    Blogs document students’ thought processes on how ideas connect and evolve over time and also facilitate the organisation of information into meaningful personal narratives. They give students the flexibility of deciding and forming their own writing style – on how information can be presented with images, pictures, and videos. Thus, students have ownership over their blog entries making it their intellectual property and this again  differentiates blogging from other tools like discussion forum which enables students to develop a sense of responsibility over the information they upload.
  3. Informality in blogs encourages engagement
    Blogging has some form of informality to it, unlike essays, and this informality allows students to comment on each other’s blogs, create their posts at their own time and pace. This gives students the opportunity to develop enough understanding of a concept before articulating it into text. Students become engaged not only in their writing, but also in their peers’ writing.
  4. Enhance writing and communication skills
    Making blog entries helped students to hone their writing and communication skills.

Thus, blogging can build a structure for reflective learning through knowledge creation and sharing and influences students to respond to thought provoking questions, reactions to photos and images, give opinions, discuss and debate on issues.

Take-home Lessons from the Blogging exercise

  • Keep up the momentum to encourage students to make better posts. This would require the instructors and tutors to read and comment regularly to provide the necessary feedback. 
     
  • Provide students with easy accessto the class blogs so they will read them. For example, provide:
    • a single list containing links to each individual student blog
    • an aggregated list of all blog posts made by all students (blog aggregate sites like NetVibes.com are helpful in achieving this)
    • an OPML file (a file containing a structured list of blogs) containing all the class blogs. If students are using blog readers (e.g. Google Reader), the OPML file allows them to ‘subscribe’ to all the class blogs in their reader quickly and easily.
  • Use face-to-face (F2F) lecture time to highlight exemplar blog entries, discuss good and bad posts, and provide guidelines and pointers to improve subsequent posts.
  • Use blogs as a source of student feedback, allowing them to guide the selection of discussion topics for class, and also to observe how students understand and apply concepts. Topics and examples that students blog on can be used in F2F classroom discussions, and this serves to further engage and encourage students.
  • Set up a good grading criteria
    To get students to reflect appropriately when writing their blog posts, guidelines need to be provided. This is dependent on the course and its objectives. Here is an example from Anand’s course on how students’ posts were categorised:

    • Relevant – a post containing information relevant to the course is the bare minimum;
    • Descriptive – the post describes a state of affairs well and is useful for other students to read;
    • Analytical – the post provides some analysis on a state of affairs and draws a logical, sound conclusion
    • Normative – a student is able to identify ethical principles, phenomena and values being affected by a state of affairs, evaluates the effects, and provides claims of good/bad and ethical justification;
    • Multi-Perspective – a student considers different/multiple perspectives involved before making ethical claims;
    • Engaged – a student is able to engage other students through subsequent discussions and demonstrate thorough involvement in the topic discussed
  • Use checkpoints to make sure that students do a progressive submission of blog entries at regular intervals during the semester.
  • Get students to use appropriate user identities (e.g. matriculation numbers or official email IDs, instead of nicknames) to help in identifying blog authors and commentators for grading.
  • Legal/copyright issues need to be explained to students.
  • Instructors to lead by example by writing blog entries that are exemplary and also start discussions on students’ blog entries.

In summary, Anand acknowledged that the exercise was a success as he was able to get his students to explore and engage in the world of IT more deeply than before. He also indicated that his students were involved in a more reflective thought processes. He was also happy that some of his students were continuing to engage their peers on their blogs even after the course ended.

Summary of the Discussion
A lively discussion followed the presentation, with participants offering suggestions on how they used blogs:

  • One participant suggested providing guidelines and word limits for the blog entries and comments, and to get students to provide both a ‘for’ and ‘against’ stance when commenting.
  • Another participant elaborated on how she and her team required each student to make a blog post as part of their CA assignment. Students were given ample preparation time with specific set of guidelines laid out. Her team assigned one tutor to grade all the blog posts made by the students of that class to account for fair grading and that was made easy with the set of guidelines. Other tutors/TAs posted constructive comments on each of the students’ blogs to encourage student discussion on the blog posts.
  • Few participants wondered if Facebook would be a more comfortable platform rather than blogs, while there were others who argued that they would not use Facebook. Those who wanted to use Facebook felt its proximity with students would be a plus factor. Those who objected felt that Facebook had particular drawbacks, being a third party application governed under US laws and with frequently changing privacy terms. Others added that material posted on Facebook by students was legally Facebook’s property and that one cannot be sure if materials deleted from Facebook are actually removed completely.

Q & A Session

Following the presentation, a lively discussion ensued and listed below are some questions from the subsequent Q & A session.

Q:  Normally when someone makes changes to a blog post, they normally just strikethrough. How do you deal with it? Do you have to save the previous version to check the changes made?
AR: For my class, my students did not use the strikethrough method but instead made changes in the Comments field. When the posts were edited, students marked the edited parts e.g. with a word ‘Edit’ or coloured in red font. 
Q: I use blogs to make status updates for a language class on German to improve their language skills. But sometimes some students make a number of updates (of bad quality) while others resort to the minimum requirement. How would you manage this?
AR: For our case, we use blogs to for students to give essay posts while your purpose was to use the German language more. Yes, I have students who are familiar with blogs that keep posting while those who are not familiar will stop at the minimum requirement. For a start, we gave suggestions on topics and comments on how entries could be improved by highlighting the good and bad posts. Some suggestions by other lecturers were to ask students to peer-review their classmates’ blog, or to get students to recommend a chosen post to be graded instead of grading all their writing. To help students in making quality posts, we should make sure the instructors and tutors are trained in providing consistent feedback to the students. 
Q: Do you give any guidelines on how to comments?
AR: No. We didn’t expect many students to comment on others’ posts, but they did. We thought the ones commenting will be tutors. To start, we highlighted good blog posts in lecture, and students would read them and begin commenting. The subsequent blog entries got better and better, as students commented on each other’s thoughts.  
Q: Last week, we had a workshop on Facebook. I think Facebook is similar but better. What are your views?
AR: The younger generation feels blogging is not so much in fashion. But they “blog” on Facebook often. We wanted this exercise to have a little more security and control, and to be within NUS’s official walls (rather than using an external blogging platform). NUS’s blogging platform inherently requires students to adhere to NUS’s IT policies, so they know there are already common guidelines in place for acceptable behavior and etiquette. 

Facebook for Teaching and Learning

Technology in Pedagogy, No. 1, April 2011
Written by Kiruthika Ragupathi

Over the years since its inception, Facebook (FB) has become the social network site of choice by University students. Selwyn (2007) describes how Facebook has become an integral part of the “behind the scenes” college experience. Singapore has 77.8% internet penetration and a high usage rate for Facebook.  

By using Facebook, instructors can take advantage of and use the student space, says Erik Mobrand, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.  He teaches on topics including the politics of development, social policy, popular culture and politics, and political finance. 

In the session, Dr Mobrand shared his experience with using Facebook in Honours modules over the past years and he suggested some ideas for getting started.

       fb-06apr2011-1     fb-06apr2011-3     

Collaboration in syllabus writing

In the year 2008, Dr Mobrand had the students in his seminar-style Honours module class on “Money and Politics” to prepare syllabus and readings for his class (Class size: 25 students). He gave a list of core readings and illustrative readings that is important for the class to get started.

Every week he got two students to lead the seminar rather than him hijacking the discussion. These students would then assign readings – video clips, images, journal articles, or papers – for the entire class and is shared with their peers. For this sharing and for enabling students to do the class work in their familiar space, he set up a Facebook group for his class. The group was a closed group and invited his students to join the group.

The results? He transformed his students from learners to teachers, which improve outcomes.  His students made connections between concepts in class and the real world with in the Facebook environment. The informality helped students to express themselves better and also broke down the boundaries – the academic and social boundaries.

Pedagogical advantages that Facebook offers

Dr Mobrand highlighted the following features that he liked and prompted him to explore using Facebook in his class:

    1. Engage students in a discussion

Dr Mobrand assigns two students to lead the discussion. These students post the relevant reading materials and puts down a description on their plan for the discussion. Students engage in the discussion before the face-to-face (F2F) class.  Dr Mobrand then takes a few minutes before each seminar to check the discussion on FB and this would enable him to take the discussion easily from FB into the F2F seminars. He also awards marks for student participation with a few percentage points.

    1. Allow students to easily post and view  video clips and pictures

Facebook allows for posting and sharing information with the ability to include notes, and upload videos and pictures. He realised that students found materials that they can easily relate to. This fosters student interactivity and creates student-generated content. Dr Mobrand indicated his liking of a clean and simple interface which allows for easy sharing as large percent of students are using it and will get their materials with a click within their space.

    1.  Bring the learning environment to students’ social space

Dr Mobrand felt that FB increases accessibility and breaks down false boundaries. He also sees that as he moves from the academic space like the IVLE to the social space, the need for students to move back and forth between academic and social becomes unnecessary. In the examples he showcased, he pointed out that most of his class discussions happened in the middle of the night. Hence breaking down the boundary between academic and social and moving into the social space of students makes it easy for him to capture their interest.

As students are socializing in their space, they come across interesting articles and will immediately post them for the class to read. Students can easily access FB on mobile devices, so using FB in the class allows them to participate in academic activities while on the move. Dr Mobrand felt that this would not happen if they were to post in academic spaces like the LMS. This informality helps students to express themselves better.

Summary of Feedback/Suggestions from the Discussion
Following the presentation by Dr Mobrand, a lively discussion followed touching on issues related to using social media in classes – both small and large classes, comparing using Facebook to the learning management systems or blogs, and forming ideas on how they could use Facebook in their classes.

  • When a participant wondered if it would be feasible to use FB for large classes, other participants proposed using tutorial groups to create individual FB groups. Then each tutorial group facilitated by a tutor could discuss their issues on their FB group. Finally, a class FB group could then be used to post the summary of the individual FB discussions. This will then allow the instructor and the class to view post before a F2F class discussion.
  • Some participants using blogs felt that they could supplement their blogs with FB groups for sharing of information as blogs act more as a platform for reflection and is expository while FB is not.
  • One participant said that he would try using FB during classes, to enable the shy students in his class to participate.
  • Others suggested using it upload video presentation of students and allow students to review their peer’s presentation.

Finally, it was acknowledged that students are using FB for academic purposes on their own. Dr Mobrand noticed that students were holding a mock diplomatic meeting in another colleague’s class using FB groups for coordinating within their team. This was something that students had done on their own without any instruction from the lecturer. It goes to show that many students see FB as a natural way of communicating with their peers on academic matters even if instructors do not command them to do so. Hence, it is clear that students are already using FB for learning purposes and so it is important for instructors to exploit it to the benefit of both the teachers and students.

Q & A Session

Following the presentation by Dr Mobrand, a lively discussion ensued and listed below are some questions from the subsequent Q & A session.

Q:  As learning becomes socialized, will students get distracted? Will the quality of learning get affected?
EM: Facebook is a distraction. But, I favour distraction and want them to be distracted and we are actually taking advantage of that distraction. Instead of showing videos to their friends, they can become distracted with our class happenings.
Q: How do you mark student participation?
EM: I mark student participation in FB similar to that of participation during in-class discussions. I generally look for the quality of the responses – looking for students who express interestingly and the frequency at which such interesting responses are posted. 
Q: Do you restrict the length of the posts or comments?
EM: No. I do not set a limit to the comments and posts. As for the length of the comments, lengthy discussions are quite common in F2F class discussions; students do give lengthy responses and if we don’t encourage those, students would stop participating.  So, the same would apply here as well. But in general, good comments are concise. 
Q: How much do you control the discussions in FB?
EM: I am okay if the discussion goes slightly off the topic but I will intervene when that happens too much. In the early days, when interesting debates came up, I used to intervene, get involved in the participation and offer my comment. Once I wrote my comments, the discussion usually would die down soon.  After that experience, I slowed down on commenting immediately. However, I read the comments and pick out useful things that are important and bring them into the classroom for F2F discussion. 
Q: How often do you initiate a discussion?
EM: Usually the two students leading the discussion that week will initiate the discussion and the discussion happens until the F2F seminar is held, after which it slowly sizzles out.
Q: How long do you keep the comments? Do you showcase good comments/posts?
EM: I keep some comments for my own reference and clean them up from time to time. However, I have never tried showcasing good comments for future use.  But we do a great deal of discussion on comments and posts. 
Q: How different is the discussion from using chat and discussion in IVLE?
EM: Similar but this environment is more receptive and attractive as it is trendier among students. IVLE appears to be more of an academic platform for students. Using discussions in an LMS environment is moving students into the locked-down mode which removes the very openness and the ease in usage while in FB. 
Q: How much additional work is required to use Facebook?
EM: Thinks it requires less time and work. The time taken Is for me to read the comments before class. But it is time well spent, as it gives me more sense of students’ understanding and allows me to prepare for class. This gives me a good idea of their understanding of the reading posted and does not require to guess on what is working and what isn’t. 
Q: What are some problems that you have encountered?
EM: What’s gone wrong – I did not face any huge problems. But I have heard from colleagues in secondary schools that students write inappropriate comments. And recently it has also been reported in the newspapers that students may get confused and post personal comments into the FB group.
Q: Did you encounter resistance from your students? Did they feel it was an invasion of their privacy?
EM: Students did not think it was an invasion of privacy as I allowed them to create fake account specific for the class.

We sincerely welcome your feedback on this session and new ideas on how you have used or would use Facebook for academic purposes.

Assess students prior knowledge to identify misconceptions

Activity type:  Feedback, Student Learning 

Tool(s) used:  LumiNUS Quiz, Readings, Weblinks

Description:
Prior knowledge is necessary for learning, hence it would be a benefit if faculty are able to assess their students’ prior knowledge of a subject before they start their introduction of the subject in class.

Using a simple quiz (LumiNUS Quiz) with multiple choice questions, faculty can quickly gauge their students’ knowledge level. For instance, you could have a short quiz at least two days before the lecture asking students to identify new concepts or distinguish between various new concepts in the assigned readings.

Provide support for assignments

Activity type: Assessment, Communication, Collaboration

Tool(s) used: LumiNUS Files, LumiNUS Forum

Description:
Week 1: During the first week, the facilitator provides the class with an introduction and overview of the assignment, essay or proposal that is to be prepared by students.

Week 2: The students take this time to think through their proposals, while the facilitator helps them with their queries

Week 3: Students submit their draft proposal through the discussion forum (LumiNUS Forum). Students from the class peer review at least three draft proposals submitted by their peers. The facilitator also participates in the discussion and gives his feedback. However, the facilitator gives time for other students to give their comments before he intervenes with his comments.

Week 7: During week 7, all students submit their sections 1, 2 & 3 through the Students Submissions available in the LumiNUS Files. Students are paired up to review their peer’s work. Each student submits their peer reviewed back into the Students Submissions section. The facilitator then review both the draft poposal and the feedback from the peers and gives his feedback allowing students to further improve on their work.

Week 13: Students then submit their final assignment (1,000 – 2,000 word essay) through the Students Submission section of the LumiNUS Files.

This way the students benefit a lot and are able to critically evaluate and improve on their assignments effectively.

Engage students or gather data

Activity type:  Communication, Feedback

Tool(s) used:  LumiNUS Poll

Description:
Intersperse “Opinion polls” to engage students using the LumiNUS Poll.

This terrific activity enables you to gather short snippets of data that can be for conducting “real-time” research on student learning in the classroom setting. It is beneficial for students in helping them understand course concepts.

This will also allow students to reflect on their understanding and thereby contributes to the improving of their exam grades.

5-minute chats before or at start of class

Activity type:  Communication

Tool(s) used:  LumiNUS Chatroom

Description:
A five-minute chat before or at the start of a class gets EVERYONE talking right away and gives the faculty member a quick sense of students’ understanding of a topic
The chat could be done based on groups with the facilitator joining in different chats
Chats could make references to a specific assignment due that day

Tips:
The chat sessions can be easily archived and enables the facilitator to revisit the chats

Provide feedback on peer’s presentation

Activity type:  Feedback, Collaboration

Tool(s) used:  Multimedia, LumiNUS Forum

Description:
Students view the video recorded session uploaded in the multimedia
Students do a peer review with another student assigned in a forum and provide feedback on areas identified
Tutor will review the feedback and give final comments in the forum

Tips:
Variations to using the video is to use audio clips

Enhance students’ understanding of topics

Activity type:  Understanding student learning

Tool(s) used:  Readings, Web links, LumiNUS Forum

Description:
Post reading articles online weekly
Create question(s) in discussion forum(s) based on reading articles – for specific topic
Students discuss using the forum before face-to-face class ( 1 week duration)
Discussion moves  from discussion forum to face-to-face class

Extend real-time class discussions

Activity :  Communication, Collaboration

Tool(s) used:  LumiNUS Forum, LumiNUS Chatroom

Description: 

  • Divide students into groups to discuss on different issues related to a topic in class. A variation could be to ask groups to further discuss using the LumiNUS chat room.
  • Summary of the group discussion is posted on the discussion forums
  • Class discusses each group’s inputs/comments
  • Allows for review/re-visit/continue  discussion