Since there were some responses to my question about the use of bulletin boards, I thought it might be time to sum up some of the responses.
There were a couple of responses saying that a bulletin board, either as a mailinglist or as a partof WebCT/Blackboard/... had been used with limited success. Having the technique available doesn't necessarily make people use it. Some responses mentioned more successful use: *No 1******** 'I have been experimenting with the use of WebCT to facilitate out-of-class discussions among students who normally meet in the traditional face-to-face classroom setting. Generally, I post an assignment that requires them to think about statistical issues and send their comments to their classmates. In the assignment instructions, I include requirements, such as "make at least 2 meaningful contributions to the discussion by Thursday at noon, and at least one comment regarding something posted by one of your classmates by Friday at noon." For example, on one assignment I gave them a set of newspaper articles in which a (questionably correct) statitstical inference had been made. Then I asked them to comment as to why one might question the findings.' *No 2************ >From my experience you will have to create reasons for the participants to use a >discussion forum. I create tasks like find a common name for the study group etc. >Then I give assignments for individuals to send in, primarily for learning purposes. >But first they must publish some part of the report to the others in their study >group and give peer review feedback to two others on their contributions. Then >everyone will soon get some help and hopefully they will be more confident that they >are on the right track. This also prevents me from killing myself with too much work. ******************* The use of assignments seems to be one the key issues. Technically, several posters mentioned the use of mailing lists, a solution I would choose myself if we wouldn't use a web-based platform for other parts of the course (in our case WebCT with heavy use of quizzes, but that's a different track). A concrete example of an assignment was the task to "think about statistical issues and send their comments to their classmates...For example, on one assignment I gave them a set of newspaper articles in which...statistical infeence had been made." A good example in my view, but personally I would like to have more, and I hope to be able to design more technical assignments such as computation of probabilities for a normally distributed variable. The main reason would be to force students to express technical matters in plain text. Whether this will be feasible or not still is an open question, and more examples would be welcome. If and how such assignments should be organized so as to make students work in pairs or inidividually is also not clear. Pairs means more work with setting up groups, but less work with finding suitable assignments. The question of graphics was also raised, and this is a tricky one. There are ways in which we as teachers can use low-resolution graphics produced with i e Minitab or MacAnova in e-mail messages. I don't think I could rely on my students to do the same though. So far, the responses suggest that there are several list members who would want to use bulletin boards, mailing lists or similar components in web-based platforms. The major difficulties however seem to be non-technical such as design and organization of assignments, and we seem to have more to discuss there. Suggestions would be very welcome. Robert **************** Robert Lundqvist Dept of Quality Technology & Statistics 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/ . =================================================================
