Harry Brighouse: A Game-Changer in Accountability: Using ...

Harry Brighouse: A Game-Changer in Accountability: Using Online Discussion Boards (Even in Face-to-Face Classes): "My first lecture of the week is on a Tuesday, and most of the reading is assigned for that class. Thirty-six hours before class, the students must respond to a prompt about the reading���one that is impossible to respond to coherently without having done the reading. Settings allow you to prevent them from seeing other students��� responses until after they post. Then, they have until the beginning of class to respond to a classmate. If students post, they get credit; if not, they don���t.... In smaller classes, the effect has been astonishing. Almost all my students do almost all the reading for almost every class...

...In my upper-level classes, the total word count for 20 students is often 15,000 or more... Some comments form the basis of papers; many are, themselves, rough (and, occasionally, not-so-rough) papers. The students feel accountable to me and one another. I know what they are thinking, what they understand, and what they don���t, which has transformed my preparation for class. It hasn���t made it easier or less time-consuming, but it has made it more interesting. Instead of guessing what might be useful to students, I can make well-informed judgments about what they need. I can talk much less in class than I used to, and my talk is more useful than it was. In addition, they can each know what the others think before they come to class. In combination with a policy of making them learn each other���s names, it seems to make them much more engaged with one another. Students routinely refer in class discussions to ideas other people have posted online....

Large lectures are different. I read many posts, and so do my TAs, but we don���t read everything. Typically students write a paragraph, and the response posts are often little more than a few sentences expressing agreement. I���m not a fool, and I don���t believe for a minute that all the students do all the reading. But I have evidence that many more do it than used to....

This semester I���ve been personalizing the process for the large lecture more. I require students to sit by discussion section in the lecture hall, and the Canvas (LMS) settings make it easy to organize the online interactions by discussion section���so that each student interacts only with the posts of the other 20 students in their section (whose names they already know, after just a few weeks). Maybe this will prompt more reading and more elaborate discussions.

For a long time, I assumed that everybody else was doing this, partly because it is obvious and partly because, being basically a technophobe, I am usually 5 to 10 years behind everyone else for any given technological innovation. Some readers probably think it���s hardly worth mentioning. I���d agree if it weren���t for the fact that so many colleagues express surprise and curiosity when I describe it...

#noted