What a Tech Start-Up’s Data Say About What Works in Classroom Forums – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout
Jeffery Young from the Chronicle of Higher Education shared an analysis of research conducted by Piazza, a start-up company that manages online discussion forums for thousands of courses, on online interactions among students and professors in 3,600 courses at 545 colleges and universities over a period of 18 months. The data revealed:
- highest gains in student understanding when discussion was less strictly marked
- students at highly selective universities are far more likely to ask questions anonymously than are students at other institutions
- the practice of asking students to post a comment to introduce themselves correlated with more-robust discussions
These finding are no surprise to those of us in the academic community who have been using online discussions to enhance both classroom and online courses. Perhaps now the dataset for this study is large enough to finally appease even the most vehement opponents to online instruction.
Then again…will there ever be enough data and evidence to fully convince the detractors of online and digital learning?
