I will deliver a statistics course next year which almost will be a distance course - the students are supposed to gather at four or five sites in the region. Most of the time they won't have any local statistics teacher to support them, so the intention is to make use of a course web (built in WebCT).
I have ben thinking about how a bulletin board could be used. There are several goals as I can see now: *Facilitate communication, especially around difficult parts in the course, both between students and myself and among students. *Provide a social forum so as to make students perceive themselves as less isolated. So far, most of my attempts to use a bulletin board have not been succesful. So my simple question is if there are any suggestions for and/or experiences (negative or positive) from the use of such components? To what extent should I force the students to use the bulletin board? How should I make them do so? Are there any particular topics in a general basic statistics course where a bulletin board would be especially wortwhile (or worth avoiding)? Hints, suggestions and experiences are most welcome. Robert ************* Robert Lundqvist Lulea University of Technology Sweden . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
