Michael Sankey and Marian Lewis discuss virtual classrooms with large cohorts

Michael:
Thanks for joining us, i’m joined by Marian Lewis today from the Faculty of Education now Marian is dealing with some pretty big classes, you are using some foundation classes of 800 plus students but you’re using virtual classrooms in this to engage the students can you kind of explain why you do this?

Marian:
Yeah sure. It is a fairly big course because it is a core course which means that no matter whether a student is studying to be primary, secondary, early childhood or whatever specialisation. They still have to do this course as one of four core courses. So we not only have on-campus students but we have a big online co-hort of students too and at the moment the co-hort for next semester is sitting at about 450 so that is quite a challange. Added to that challenge is the fact that the way that the course is structured, it is a philosophy of education course and the students have to engage in groups in collaborative enquiry almost from the start of the semester. So we really needed to have a mechanism where both the online teaching team can actually interact with students in a meaningful way, so we actually did divide the students up into, what we call ‘core tutorial groups’ online tutorials. They’re a little bit bigger than the on-campus ones but the interaction is different so that works quite well. And also we have to find a way for the students to be able to interact together, so that they can actually engage in collaborative enquiry and the virtual classrooms are useful in both those instances. So if you’re a member of the online teaching team, you might have say 100 students to work with, they would be in a large online tutorial group and you would interact with them and you would talk with them and invite them into the classroom for specific things at specific times in the semester whether it’s talking about one of the philosophers, theorists or setting them up for an assignment, so that is just like a classroom that you would actually get into and you would have alot of students in there. Often we, offer these in the evening as many of our students are working or they are just not available during the day. So there is that flexiblity too, that you can actually get into your virtual classroom from work or from home when you can engage with students.

Michael:
So that is staff to student interaction. What do we see students doing in the environment? Do they talk among each other as well?

Marian:
Yes, I would certaintely encourage students to bring their questions and it’s certaintly not a question where they’re not just, a situation where they’re not just listening to the lecturer or a tutor. That normally there would be some questions that are being discussed, some particular topic that is being discussed and if a student comes up with a statement or a suggestion it is very much an interactive kind of environment depending on how many students you have got in there, there are limits to the amount of interactivity.

Michael:
So what have you found to be a good number of students environment?

Marian:
Some people seem to work to up to 30, I personally haven’t. I think slightly up to 20 is probably a good number.

Michael:
And any ways you actually use to get them engaged. So it’s one thing for them to just listen, so have you got any like teasers going?

Marian:
Philosophy course, you know when you just ask... because they are such open ended questions, big questions and people regardless of what they have actually studied in terms of what they are picking up about the theorists and that is helping them to, i guess, deepen their ideas. They’ve all got their own experience and they have so much to say from their own experience about answers to questions that you can fairly quickly engage people in quite deep discussions. So unlike Camtasia relay or a lecture recording this is giving the students a much more sense of interacting with their peers.

Marian:
Yes, and you can sort of keep questioning your students to and kind of leading them onto a deeper level of thinking getting other students that are online involved. You can get quite the same dynamic in a face to face classroom, but certaintly it is real time.

Michael:
Do you find many other face to face students joining those groups or do you just keep it separate?

Marian:
No, it’s for web groups because when you got alot of numbers, the resources are I suppose limited. Because you can see who is actually online too, you can ask questions of specific people. I would choose a person from a specific list and ask them a question and then ask somebody else to comment on that and just to try and get a bit of interaction going. You can put PowerPoint up, if you’d like to to stimulate discussion and it’s great, because sometimes i’d have just dropin sessions, so if you wanted to drop in and ask a question of the course examiner then you can just come online for 5 or 10min and ask a question and go on your way.

Michael:
Excellent, thankyou for that. That has been very helpful.

Marian:
That’s ok.