Teaching Online Through Conversation

Sometimes when I tell people that I design online courses, I get a response like, “Well, computers will never replace teachers. Hrmph.” Many people have an idea of online learning as an isolating experience, where students interact with a computer but no one else. When I run into someone with that limited idea of what’s possible for online education, I do try to correct the impression and explain that online learning can involve a great deal of interaction with other people. In fact, in our courses, I think we do a pretty good job of building community. Students can’t complete our courses without interacting both with the facilitator and with other students, through discussion boards, small group work, and other activities.

In the Campus Technology article Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?, Trent Batson asks how we should teach and assess conversational writing in online courses. Conversational writing shouldn’t be the same as other writing; discussion board posts shouldn’t be written like standalone pieces that don’t reference the context of what others have said.

Batson describes one class where students didn’t initially “get” writing and interacting with each other.

The students’ first impulse was to just write essays. However, these were not conversational turns, but performances, so they were graded very low. When the students instead started picking up on elements in the previous comment and including references to these elements in their own comments, their grades went up. If the students extended their discourse skills to synthesize several comments in their own comments, they got even higher grades.

The article continues to talk about helping students gain an awareness of their audience for writing: their peers, not just the instructor. Besides audience, he identifies other principles for conversational writing:

• Coherence
• Purpose (goal)
• Diction (word choice & formality)

I really like how he emphasizes online conversations as a place to synthesize ideas from multiple people, but I think all four of these principles apply to any writing for learning. The audience for an individual assignment is different from the audience for a discussion board post; they shouldn’t be written the same. The level of formality is lower for a discussion than for an individual assignment, but higher than the formality of a chat.

Batnor also explains that Web 2.0 tools like blogs and chats are really made for conversation, and he argues that they raise the bar for teaching in a “non-stop world of conversation.” He mentions different linguistic rules for these Web 2.0 tools, but I wish he delved into that topic a bit further.

Since he didn’t talk about it extensively in his article, I’d like to continue the conversation here. Share your thoughts on any of the questions below—or ask your own question to direct the conversation!

• For those of you who have taught or taken classes with blogs, chat, or wikis, how did they work as tools for conversational learning?
• How are these tools different from the discussion boards we’ve been using for some time–or do you not really see a difference?
• Does it matter that our team communicates through a blog where you can comment and have two-way conversations, or would the experience be the same if we did an email newsletter with one-way communication?
• What about using Web 2.0 tools like blogs with a face-to-face course? How would a blended online & face-to-face environment affect conversations for learning?

Trent Batson, “Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?,” Campus Technology, 6/18/2008, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=64462