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Saturday, February 18, 2012

Feedback from my first assignment - refining my research question

I received my first assignment back from my instructor.  For those of you who are interested in such things as marks, I’ll tell you that I did well and that’s as much as I’ll say.  Because, really, that shouldn’t be the point.  Okay, I admit it.  It’s the first thing I look at when I get the rubric back.  Anyway, what is really important is the feedback that I received from my instructor.  You’ll recall from a previous post that this assignment was to be a sort of staging exercise where I was tasked to devise a research question that would be the focus for the following two assignments that would, in turn, constitute the evaluation of my performance in the course (combined with a mark for my participation).  So, my instructor’s feedback and guidance was of particular importance as it would be helpful to me throughout the rest of my assigned work.  And her feedback did not disappoint.  I have taken one other course with this instructor, a face-to-face core course, and her most recent feedback was concise, to the point and thought provoking – just as I remembered from my previous experience with her and hoped it would be in this latest course.  “The question is a good start”, she wrote, “but I am wondering if it is too broad as it addresses both the construction of knowledge and the development of a learning community.  If the question is too broad, it will take more time to research than what the course allows.  Can you revise the question to be more specific?”

I gave some considerable thought to her feedback and this is where I arrived.  What I am really interested in is the assessment of a learner's contribution to the learning community in an online environment and the challenges that this represents without the nuance that is present in a face-to-face classroom (e.g. tone of voice, body language, etc.).  The construction of knowledge seems to be easier to assess in the online classroom because there is a written transcript of the discussion.  In fact, some of my early research suggests that there are electronic tools that have been and continue to be developed to measure the level to which individual learners contribute to knowledge construction.  My thinking then, is that the contribution to the development of a learning community (what some have referred to as a social presence) online is really that much more difficult because of the medium.  The medium actually focuses all of the discussion toward knowledge construction at the detriment to the building of a social presence for the learning group.  I think that my research will tell me that half of the battle is to set up the asynchronous discussion in such a way as to allow time for the discussion to be solely about developing a learning community and I think that this will be interesting as well as useful to me professionally.  So, in an effort to provide more focus to my research here is the revised question that I've come up with:

How can we evaluate online asynchronous discussions to effectively assess a learner's contribution to the development of a learning community? 

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