Information exchange: Stage three of the five stage model

If learners have successfully passed through stages 1 and 2, then at stage 3 they are building on these and beginning to share more information, interacting with each other, and developing strategies to engage with the course content.

On the Intro to Pos Psych distance learning module this has been happening. Students are engaging well with the discussion boards, and have been spontaneously building discussions, responding to each other. Some of these I have tried to stimulate and play a part in to encourage others to post comments. In retrospect, and now being more familiar with this model of e-learning and the thinking behind e-tivities, I could have been even more mindful of this. That is, rather than encouraging or inviting students to post thoughts to the discussion board, I could have made this a 'required' e-tivity, by having students post at least one comment for each discussion thread and commenting on at least one other's post. I might have also asked a different student each week to be a 'facilitator' for the discussion that week and have them take responsibility for beginning the discussion.

UPDATE (2 Feb 2015): I related these ideas to one of the summative assignments for the Intro to Pos Psych distance learning course. This is a poster presentation that students submit via turnitin for assessement. In the attendance version of this module, students give either an oral presentation or a poster presentation to the group as part of the final teaching weekend. They are then encouraged to look at other students' posters and to ask questions to the person whose poster it is. The idea is that this feels like a poster session that you would get at an academic conference, and it gives the students some experience of disseminating and discussing their work in this way.

To replicate this online, I asked students to post their posters on the discussion board and then to look at others' posters and to post questions for at least 2 other students. This built some good in-depth discussion between students that needed little input from me (I did make sure I asked at least one question to each student). The depth of the discussion was in some ways greater than the discussions that we sometimes see at the attendance weekends. Added to this, we have the record of the discussions automatically archived in the discussion board, which may be useful for the external examiner. Result! [I will attempt to copy this discussion across to my PGCert Bb organisation, but if this i snot possible I will aim to add the PGCert T-eL Course Team to the PS726 module shell.]