DE Oracle @ UMUC

Quality Conference Responses

George Harding

Adjunct Faculty

Graduate School of Management and Technology

Published: 0 2004

Category: » Online-pedagogy » Classroom-communication

One of the objectives each instructor in a master's program should have is to improve the student's writing skills. The online classroom is an excellent medium for doing this since all of the student's responses must be written. As part of the introductory materials for my course I instruct my students on the rigor that I desire in their responses.

Athletes practice to get ready for official sporting events. If they do not exert themselves (put forth their best effort during practice), they will not be prepared for the official events. As such, each effort/response should be a best effort. Without such practice, students, like athletes, will not be ready or prepared when required to produce quality writing on the job.

Major items that I stress in my classrooms in an effort to improve the student's writing skills are:

• Avoid excessive postings that do not add value to the discussion.
  • Responses should add value/substance to the discussion.
  • Don't restate what has already been stated or add "me-too" comments.
• Avoid last-minute responses, which, because of timing do not allow the instructor and fellow students to properly comment upon them.
• Avoid responses that are too pedantic, too technical and/or contain too much jargon (especially from military students whose vocabulary often includes acronyms unfamiliar to non-military students).
• Change the title of the response to reflect the major point of the response.
• Define each acronym the first time it is used in a submission. Avoid misunderstandings by never assuming that the reader will know the meaning of the acronym.
• Facilitate the "threading" of content by responding to the appropriate content and addressing the person to whom you're responding.
• Perform independent research on the topic and cite materials that support your position. As quality guru Dr. W. Edward Deming used to say in his lectures, "Without factual supporting data, you are just one more person with an opinion".
  • Ensure that web links are clickable.
  • Supply full supporting data for references not available on the web at the bottom of your response.
  • I manually keep track of the number of web links and references not available on the web and factor these counts into the student's class participation grade.
  • To encourage independent research I include a considerable number of references in my comments and summaries.
• Type your responses offline in a word processor to take advantage of the spelling and grammar checking features of the word processor before copying them into the classroom:
  • Proofread and edit the copied data as necessary to ensure that none of the characters have been distorted in the copying process.
  • Keep a backup copy of the uploaded work for several days in case a problem develops on the servers. This provides you the ability to reload data that may be lost.
• Unless necessary, do not submit attachments, since they require extra work to read and impede the ability to follow a thread.

It is important that these guidelines be published at the beginning of each class and enforced during the discussions. During the first week of class, I critique the first couple of students who violate the above guidelines, hoping that the rest of the class will get the message. Except for flagrant violations, after the first week, I no longer critique violations of the guidelines. However, they do affect the quality rating of the student's class participation grade.

I encourage every instructor to incorporate the above guidelines in his or her class. In addition, I recommend that a conference topic be opened in week 1 to enable the students to comment upon the above items. As one of my students commented in this the week 1 discussion on this topic, "It's nice to know the rules of the game."