Meredith Jones, Humanities & Social Sciences
"Virtual Communities: Communication History" is a subject about online communities and social interaction in online worlds. As part of the subject the 25 undergraduate students experience what it is like to be part of an online digital community. The assessment of the online discussion is the part of the subject that the students have had the least experience with and the students get detailed information in the subject outline explaining to them what they need to do online.
The online discussion is 20% of their final mark and involves the students contributing a minimum of 1500 words to an open forum over the entire semester. The purpose of posting online is that students can read each other's contributions and comment on them. Meredith has found that the online forum provides opportunities for students who are not talkative in the classroom to participate in the discussions. To ensure regular involvement there is a minimum word count of 50 words for each week, which is intended to stop students from putting their entire 1500 words in the last week. There is no maximum word limit.
The students are asked to try and relate their discussions to the readings that are set for each week. Generally the first threads are almost always about the readings but by the end of semester a thread that was started in the first week that is still going has transformed into a broader discussion about globalisation or the impact of different technologies. As long as the students keep on interacting in a suitably scholarly way, there is no limit to what they discuss.
The lecturer does not read every piece of work as it comes throughout the semester but keeps abreast of the broad movements in the students' postings. By the end of semester she has a general idea of what themes are being discussed. To assess their online discussion she uses the ordering tool in Canvas to sort each student's contributions into a list and as a result can get an instant impression of how much they have done each week.
After sorting the entries Meredith then checks that they have reached the required word limit. This is also a relatively straightforward process as each student writes how many words they wrote at the end of every input and then calculates their on-going word count. There is no penalty for missing weeks as long as there is a gradual accumulation of words throughout the semester
The lecturer then reads through the students entire contributions for a semester determining how each one applied to the general themes that emerged in the online discussion. The students receive half their marks for their engagement with the topics and their understandings of the areas, plus their use of the theorists from the readings. The other half of their final assessment is based on how much they have interacted with the other postings in the forum. The students will get the highest marks when there is a good balance of engagement with the text and the ideas in the subject along with a very interactive conversational approach towards their fellow students.
