How to NOT answer your students' questions

OK, so you have an anonymous discussion board for asking about problems and solutions, and you get questions like this:

"Help! I don't know how to work this kind of problem! Somebody please explain!" Followed by a problem from the end of the chapter or online quiz.

I get this kind of "fishing" for answers frequently. Of course, it doesn't help the student very much if I just given them the solution, right? But how do I approach this to keep an open dialog with the student? My first attempt is usually something like this: "Can you explain how you are approaching the problem? What have you tried so far? If I know how you are thinking about the problem, I can probably help you find the trouble spot." If I can get the student to invest some time and effort in the problem, they have a better chance of understanding the solution when we finally get to it. Of course, he or she may have really tried to solve the problem, and I think this is frequently the case, but it helps both of us to have them explain what they've done so far.

Often, the reply is, "I just don't know how to even start it!" In that case, I'll offer a way to begin the problem. "Oh, well what I usually do when I start working a problem like this is to..." This gives them a chance to get the problem started and perhaps they will be able to take it from there. At least, I've kept the conversation going and hopefully helped them think through the solution.

If getting them started wasn't enough to get them finished, I will eke out steps in the process: "OK, next I usually do this...". At some point, the lightbulb turns on and they figure it out (or they just get tired of all the conversation :-). Most of the time, they give a positive confirmation that they "got" the problem at some point. This gives me a chance to then re-cap the process and summarize the way we approached and solved the problem. Sometimes, due to schedules and such, this process can take a few days, but if we both happen to be on line simultaneously, it could be just a few minutes.

In the long run, I think it's always better to be Socratic and ask the student to invest a few brain cells in thinking through the solution than to just give them a pat answer. Equally important, in my opinion, is to always be encouraging and welcoming so the students don't get the impression that they are being a nuisance -- even if they are!

Boundaries - the secret to keeping your sanity

There's a fine line between being accessible to your students and being too accessible. When I first started teaching online, I checked into my course several times a day because I was paranoid about missing an important question or problem or issue. I found that the questions and problems and issues expanded to fill as much time as I devoted to them, and I was rapidly getting burned out. I've settled on a compromise that works very well for me -- I check in on my classes every day, but I only do it once a day. After I get home from my day-job, I relax, work out or do something with one of my hobbies, and have dinner. After that, usually around 7:30 or 8:00 PM, I login to my online classes to see what's going on. This keeps me in touch with the discussions and issues of the class, while allowing me to stay caught up on answering questions and emails. This makes it much less stressful on me, but my students always comment on how responsive I am. Every semester, at least one of my students says something like, "My other online instructor never answers my emails -- thanks for being so responsive!" I don't feel like I'm working terribly hard to stay in touch with the students, but they sometimes perceive it as something extraordinary.

Obviously, my schedule isn't going to necessarily work for you, but I encourage you to find your own boundary balancing point that allows you to be accessible and responsive, but still leaves time for the rest of your life.

Login-Jam

Ever have a login-jam? That's the inability to make it past your keyboard and into your online course. You might also call it login anxiety, the course curse, student avoidance or any other number of things. In reality, it's the (normally) baseless fear that a) your students will ask you a question that you don't know how to answer, or b) they will plea for accommodation or some other exception to the rules for some reason or c) you will encounter something else that you just don't want to deal with. Most of the time, I battle my way past this fear only to find that none of these things have come to pass and that I merely have a couple of routine questions to address. My object today is to point out all the benefits that we online instructors have over our "traditional" classroom counterparts.

1) Our online students can't see or hear us. Many is the time that I have been glad that this is the case! When reading a ridiculous question that could be easily answered if the student had actually read the text, be thankful that they cannot hear you shout "Holy &%^#, I can't believe anyone could be this stupid!" True story -- I was tutoring a student via an Elluminate shared whiteboard (a wonderful free tool, by the way) in my General Chemistry class and she was trying to solve an equation that was literally something like this: 27 = 1/x

Her response, after several minutes of silence: "I know I should know how to find the value of x, but I just can't remember how to do it." I threw up my hands and stomped out of the room -- I couldn't believe that a college chemistry student wasn't able to solve such a trivial problem! I was very glad that she only "heard" me say something kind and encouraging when I came back to my keyboard after composing myself.

2) We have time to compose an intelligent and insightful answer. Unlike when we are in a classroom environment, we are never faced with the problem of coming up with a wise and informed response on the spur of the moment. This is as true for questions about special treatment and accommodations as it is for questions about content. For example, one of my students recently wrote: "Hi Dr. Dan! I'm writing because I have just gotten the flight information to go to Alaska for a fight this weekend. I'm filling in for another woman. I train with the woman who is the main even on this fight card, XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX, and when the promoter asked her if she knew anybody who could fight at 140 lbs she suggested my name. I had a hunch I might get to do this on Monday but it wasn't until a few hours ago that I got the flight info, I leave tomorrow at 9 and I haven't even seen the return flight info now that I think about it.... Anyway, I thought I would ask if there is any kind of deadline extending you could do for me this week. I understand if not, it is the midterm after all, but I would really benefit if you could... because it is the midterm, after all! Sorry for making this so wordy, I am probably over explaining myself." My first inclination, since this arrived a couple of days before the deadline, was to say, "Good luck with your fight, but you have time to get the test done." However, upon reflection, I decided that this was an exceptional enough reason to give her a few more days to complete the exam.

3) We always have the choice to engage or not engage. Related to advantage number 2 is that we don't always have to respond to things our students say "in class." If they make a discussion posting that advances an incorrect idea, we don't necessarily have to say anything about it. It may make our blood-pressure increase to stay quiet, but we have the option of letting a day or so go by and seeing what happens. In my experience, most of the time another student will chime in with a correcting post and straighten their classmate out. This gives students an opportunity to do some teaching, which will enhance their own learning, and saves us from having to formulate a corrective reply, which might not have been as effective as what the classmate said. Anyway, there's simply nothing wrong with reading through the discussion posts and taking a day to think about them before you even consider replying.

So, next time you feel that tension when you think about logging into your course, think about all the positive things in our favor as online instructors. Take a deep breath, relax, and jump into the course -- it's almost never as bad as the anticipation!

The learning curve

Whenever students ask me if I “curve” my course, my standard answer is “no, because I don’t believe in basing your grade on someone else’s performance.” But, that’s not the kind of curve I’m talking about today.

How many of you have lab reports or other written reports as part of your course? Most, if not all, I suspect. Communicate coherently about a subject is a way to demonstrate multi-dimensional understanding about it, since the student often must synthesize ideas to explain their subject fully. One important aspect of writing a report or a paper is understanding what the instructor wants in the way of format, content, etc. Although we clearly state our requirements in our respective syllabi, the students often don’t grasp our intent (assuming they read it in the first place) and the first (or first few) reports are usually pretty traumatic for both of us. This was my experience for several semesters until I decided to do something different and it has made a huge difference. In the chemistry course I teach, the students write reports on 9 labs through the course of the semester. During the first unit of the course, two reports are due. In the past, these first reports were usually terrible; indicating that many students had either not read or had willfully ignored my requirements. On average, it wasn’t until the 4^th report that most students had gotten the message and had read and attempted to conform to the requirements. As you can imagine, this was a source of frustration for me – why weren’t they just doing what I asked?

The solution I came up with was two-fold. First, knowing that students often had trouble getting textbooks and lab kits until several days into the course, I relaxed the Unit 1 deadlines so that they could turn in both reports (and all three chapter tests) at the very end of the Unit. Secondly, I encouraged them to turn in the first lab report as soon as they could, promising that I would return it with feedback, but would not grade it until after they resubmitted. This made all the difference. I still get similar numbers of terrible first reports, but for some reason they respond better to the non-graded feedback and fix the systemic issues very rapidly. On average, they are now hitting the target by the 2^nd report instead of the 4^th, which allows me to focus more energy on their understanding of the lab itself, rather than on formatting issues.

Students behaving badly – online.

In my experience, I believe that the vast majority of online students are honest and honestly want to learn the material. Perhaps I’m being a Pollyanna, but even though I have caught students in lies and other dishonest behavior, that doesn’t change my general outlook.

Here are three of my personal “hall of famers” when it comes to bad behavior online:

1) Get the Facts! Student X wrote frantically, the day after a lab deadline, and told me that he had not been able to get online all week due to technical problems. Thus, the late lab report! Oh, if only he could have logged into the course before the deadline! Obviously, he didn’t realize that I had the ability to view (in Blackboard) when he had logged on, how long he had been logged on, and what parts of the course he accessed in that time period. Of course, he had logged into the course virtually every day during the previous week and hadn’t even accessed the lab dropbox. When I let him know that I could see his online activity during the previous week, he literally had nothing to say about it. However, he didn’t try to pull that particular stunt again.

2) Always keep your Department Leadership in the loop. My course policy on lab reports for the first unit of the course is fairly relaxed. Because students can sometimes have trouble getting the lab kits, I allow all the labs for the first unit to be turned in as late as the end-of-unit deadline. If they choose to turn in the first lab report prior to that, I will mark it and return it and it can be resubmitted for full points (this cuts down on the learning curve). One semester, student Y waited until the unit deadline to turn in all three of the Unit One lab reports. She didn’t do well on any of the three, having obviously not consulted the syllabus for the report requirements. She sent me a very polite email asking if she could please re-submit all three reports, since she was unaware of the course policies. I politely declined and pointed out that she could still get full credit on the remaining 6 lab reports. That’s when things got nasty. She began posting scathing comments about what a bad teacher I was to the discussion boards and sent me an email explaining how I was robbing her of her “A”. I immediately notified my Department Chair and sent him all of the previous email traffic so he could be ready for the gathering storm. Sure enough, her next step was to contact everyone at CCCOnline that she could find an email for, complaining that I was only interested in penalizing students, and not in helping them learn. Thankfully, she was quickly squelched and decided to drop the course.

3) Communicate in writing and keep all your emails. The last in our rogues’ gallery is the “Absent-minded Prevaricator.” I was calculating final grades a couple of days after the course was over, and noticed that student Z had not taken the final exam! I immediately contacted him via his external email and asked him if everything was OK. He replied that all was well, but that he had simply forgotten about the final. I let him know, since this was the case, that I would have to assign him a grade of “C”, which is what he had without the final exam. He said he understood and reiterated that it had been his fault. Then, he sent this email to the CCCOnline Registrar:

“Hello,

I dont know who I should be contacting about this. I had an emergency and was NOT able to take my chemistry final. I thought my teacher was going to extend the deadline for me, but he didnt read my emails. He thought I blew off the final because my grade was passing and very good at that. I ONLY needed to answer 5 questions right to get a "B" letter grade in this class.

He turned my grade in with a "C." This is unexceptable because I SHOULD have had a B and I actually would have gotten an A if I aced the final, which I had planned on doing. Please, I need help ASAP! Im sorry this email is so frantic but Im freaking out knowing that I got a C because I couldnt take my final exam.”

Well, it was comforting to know that he was planning to “ace the final”, but he was clearly lying about everything else. Since I had saved all the email traffic, we were able to quickly put this one to bed without further incident. I shudder to think how difficult this would have been if I had conversed with him over the telephone instead of email.

Even though you will occasionally run into some dastardly characters, and you should always keep your RADAR on for suspicious behavior, don’t forget that most students are being honest with you. Treat everyone with consideration, but be ready to deal with the situation if things turn ugly.

Why use Anonymous Discussions?

Once again, sorry for my infrequent postings. I've been struggling with a cold/flu thing for the past week or so and haven't felt up to it.

When I first started teaching online, I didn't see a purpose for anonymous discussion boards. It seemed pointless, but over time I've come to see anonymous postings as one of the most valuable discussion tools at my disposal.

1) They encourage honest questions about the material. Students hate to look stupid, and few things make you feel more stupid than having to publicly ask for help with a problem. Before allowing anonymous postings, I rarely received questions about problems on the website, unless they were direct emails. Since students often had the same questions or types of questions, I found myself typing the same answers over and over again. Once I opened up an anonymous discussion devoted to homework questions, students started posting there and then everyone could benefit from the answers.

2) They encourage honest feedback. This worked two ways. First, when students posted anonymous questions about homework and such, other students could anonymously attempt to answer the question and help their fellow students. They could do this without fear of either being wrong, or of being perceived as a know-it-all. I'm not sure which they feared the most, but I suspect the former. They knew that I would correct their response if it was wrong, and didn't have to worry about being identified. You might be surprised at how many students take the opportunity to try to answer classmates' questions in this way, which helps them understand the material better too. Secondly, I can get honest (and sometimes brutal) feedback about the course itself and about my teaching. I've never had a student do this in an unprofessional or unkind way, although the feedback has not always been the nicest to hear :-).

3) They allow me to play "student". I have sometimes taken advantage of anonymity myself. For example, there are certain parts of the general chemistry material that always engender the same questions or which students frequently have hard time grasping. When we are approaching a lab or assessment that I know will give some of the students trouble, I can seed the field a little by posting a "student" question about it, if someone hasn't done it already. I can then answer the question as myself so the class can benefit from the answer. This isn't totally disingenuous, as I base my "student" post on questions from actual students in the past.

So, if you don't already use them, try giving anonymous discussion boards a try. Of course, in D2L, you can allow anonymous posting, but each poster must check the "author anonymously" check-box before they save their post.

Redirecting discussions – keeping the topic fresh and engaging

Sorry I’m a bit slow on my posting lately. The past couple of weeks have been crazy busy with grading and business-travel and other things conspiring to use up all my free time. Anyway, here we go with part two of my three-part post on discussions.

When I first started teaching online, I kept getting “dinged” by Quality Assurance for not appropriately “redirecting” my discussions. “Redirecting”? I mean, I was participating and making comments and such, but it wasn’t immediately clear to me what that word meant. With some help from my mentor, it finally clicked for me.

Even if you choose the most exciting and engaging topic possible, as you’ve probably realized in your own classes, the discussion will usually run out of steam in a fairly short period of time; a few days or a week. Most of my discussion topics are set to run for at least two weeks, so this can be a problem. Another problem is that the earliest posters will usually get all the “juice” out of the subject and then everything kind of starts to lag. What do you do then? Trying to flog the original prompt doesn’t work very well (I know from experience), as it usually just generates insincere posts that mostly fill up space. Here are a few things that seem to work pretty well, and if you have any other tricks or techniques that you employ, please share them:

1) Stay involved in the discussion on a daily basis. I know we aren’t required to post daily, but at least read daily and maintain contact with the ebb and flow of ideas. This will offer you your best opportunity to see threads that can be tapped into for fresh directions or ideas, which is the next point.

2) Identify “juicy” posts and use them to push the discussion in a new direction. You know, the posts that students obviously thought about a little more than some of their peers, which offer some fresh ideas that you can work with? For example, in a discussion about uncertainty, precision and accuracy in my chemistry course, one student had this as part of one of her posts: “In working with the state crime lab, I was able to observe the impact of uncertainty in the drug/chemical department, in the fact that something must be tested several times to quantify amounts or even to determine the presence of a substance. If we were to test something inaccurately... it could mean a whole misrepresentation on an outcome of a case.”

State crime lab?! Cool! That led to a side discussion about forensic science that was pretty interesting.

In a discussion about energy use, one of my students asked a question about something he was thinking about purchasing. It was a fuel efficiency product for his car called “water4gas”, and purported to improve his fuel efficiency by a ridiculous amount. This was an opportunity to discuss the importance of really understanding the laws of thermodynamics and their implications in our daily lives and (hopefully) he was saved the expense of buying into this scam.

3) Ask them to think more deeply about the original topic, or about a related idea. After most of the important ideas related to the original discussion prompt have been tossed about, sometimes there’s no obvious direction to take the discussion. That may call for what is essentially a new discussion prompt. For example, one time my class was discussing what manufacturers might mean by advertising their products as “chemical free”. Within a few days, we had pretty much wrung this out by covering the ideas that all products are made up of chemicals and if something were truly “chemical free” it wouldn’t exist and probably the manufacturers were trying to portray their product as benign or harmless. OK, so where do we go from there? Well, I happened to see a news story about how some people were trying to get bis-phenol A (BPA that’s found in many plastic products) classified as a “toxic chemical”. So, I saw this as an opportunity to bring up the related question: “What do you think they mean by "toxic chemical"? What chemicals do you think of when you think about non-toxic chemicals? How are toxic and non-toxic chemicals differentiated?” This started a new line of comments and ideas that got the conversation going again.

As fun and interesting as discussions can be, however, you’ll always have students who won’t want to participate for various reasons. Next time, I’ll share some of my observations about the usefulness of anonymous discussions, which can be an avenue to help students get more out of your course.