1

Message Boards: Using the Internet as an Inter-Active Medium

to Enhance Student Learning
For the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference
Washington, DC, March 18-21, 2004.
Robert H. Trudeau
Political Science Department
Providence College

1.
Introduction
This paper is a supplement to my presentation at the first APSA Teaching
and Learning
Conference, held in Washington in February of 2004.
1
The topic of my presentation is the use of
Internet message boards as an integral part of a pedagogical strategy to
improve learning in traditional
face to face undergraduate education. At the APSA conference, my
presentation will illustrate the use
of this technique inter-actively – assuming my co-participants have
cooperated by participating in the
message board set up for the occasion.

In this paper, I describe my basic approach to pedagogy; my structuring of

the message board
assignment; the practical impact of this assignment on my day to day
activities as an Instructor, both in
class and in terms of class preparation; some data on student reactions to this
assignment; and some
concluding thoughts about the rewards and costs of adopting this assignment
as a foundation for one’s
teaching. The Appendix includes the complete text of the message board
assignment as currently
configured.

2.
Pedagogy
I am committed to a pedagogy centering on “active learning,” and see
learning as a life-long
activity. My role, therefore, includes helping students develop learning skills
as well as imparting
information, the two traditional axes around which we rotate in these
discussions. When I think about
pedagogy, then, I think first in terms of two broad categories: substantive
content and
process/methodology. A third aspect of pedagogical planning is the nature of
the “raw material”:
because teaching is a student-oriented, if not student-centered, activity, I
continually try to incorporate
my thinking about the “nature” of students into my pedagogy. The following
paragraphs elaborate on
these thoughts.

In terms of substantive content, I think of course material as either primary

or secondary.
Primary material might consist of reading, viewing, or otherwise having
students receive information
or material for the first time. It refers to their first exposure to course
materials. Secondary material
involves analysis, critical thinking, etc., the “higher order” academic skills
we seek to impart. It is
generally my goal to use scarce classroom time for secondary analysis of
material, and I construct

activities accordingly. If necessary, classroom time can be spent on primary

exposure to material, but
even in these instances, I prefer to do this via questions from the students, as
opposed to lecturing,
because questions mean more thought and activity on the part of the
students.

On the “process” side, I see teaching as a kind of empowerment process. The

goal is to create
activities that over the course of a semester increase a student’s ability to
work with the substantive
content material, ultimately, ideally, without the need of a professor. From a
“leadership” perspective,
following Ben Barber, this means trying to be the kind of leader that
becomes, sooner or later, no
longer necessary: the leader as “moderator,” who successfully fades away
after helping create
leadership (read: learning) skills in others.
2
By the end of a course, I am looking to see if students can
use the skills we have focused on to analyze the material we have discussed.
To the extent that this
occurs, I have succeeded.
3
We are all products of a context, and I tend to focus as much on structural
effects on behavior
as I do on “character” explanations. In my pedagogy, I see notions like
“human nature” more as the
outcome of empirical social structures than as “truths” that exist outside of a
specific time/space
referential context. We happen to live in a liberal-capitalist society, and I
begin my pedagogical
planning with the presumptions first, that my students are conditioned by
their social surroundings and
(subconscious) political culture; and second, that their behavior is
explainable – and can be changed –
by manipulation of the context in which they operate. In other words, rather
than bemoan student
laziness or other negative personality characteristics that we hear so much
about, I prefer to organize
my teaching around “capitalistic” incentives and structural opportunities for
rational choice consistent
with an individualistic culture.

Besides their basic “capitalistic” nature, students also come in a variety of

learning style
personas. That too has to be factored in. As described above, the basic
“human nature” assumptions I
hold need to be applied at both the macro-level of the entire course and in
the specific arrangements in
any single given assignment. So too with the idea of learning styles. To the
extent possible, every
assignment and activity I incorporate into a course speaks to as many of the
concepts described above
as is possible and practical. In practice, this means that there are many
different assignments and
activities in my courses, multiple opportunities for measurement, and
therefore a variety of types of
work for students to perform (or to choose to perform, when things are
optional). Though student
performance in my courses must, ultimately, be primarily “intellectual” and
written, my syllabi
include other types of activities as well, including formal oral presentations,
a semester paper, more or
less traditional exams, even a Scavenger Hunt.

This variety is designed to let students with different styles have

opportunities to do well, but
the ulterior motive is to generate conditions that will enhance the
intellectual, written skills. These
apparently non-academic activities might make students less shy, increase
their motivation, get the
to be responsible for their own learning, give them frequent opportunities to
practice their writing,
etc.
4
This paper focuses on a single assignment, the message board assignment.
As you will read in
a moment, this assignment reflects many of the pedagogical points outlined
in this section.

3.
The Assignment
In the message board assignment, students post messages on the Internet --
via our Course
Management System, i.e. on a dedicated server -- prior to class meetings,
responding to a thought
question they have in advance. The message board assignment is a major
academic assignment in my
courses, particularly in the introductory level courses, and is usually worth
25% of a course’s final
grade. There are many posting occasions during the course of a semester,
from 14 to about 20,
depending on the course. Individual postings are graded essentially as
Pass/Fail, but the cumulative
impact of a student’s Pass postings adds up to a grade that weighs 20 or 25
% of the course grade,
again, depending on the course. So that although any single message board
is optional, this is in effect
a required activity. (The complete current version of the assignment is
appended.)
The main overall objective of this assignment is obviously to increase
student learning by having
them become more actively involved with the material they are reading and
discussing in class. This
breaks down into several sub-objectives, which speak to the pedagogical
approach I described above.
These objectives include:
-
Writing skills: students must write original material some fifteen times a
semester;
-
Critical thinking: students can, and should, respond to other student
postings, as well as to a
thought provoking question that initiates the message board;
-
Effective use of class time: we spend much more time on higher order
analysis than on primary
presentation of reading material; class discussions are better because the
students come
prepared as a result of the postings and because I can chart the discussion’s
path(s) before
class.
-
Responsibility: students essentially choose to do or not do any one of these –
no individual
Forum is required. (Everyone knows from the beginning of the semester
what the costs and
benefits are of doing this assignment.)
-
Communicating: students seem eager to engage each other in class once they
can put faces
with the names on the messages they read; students do good work because
they know their
peers will be reading.

Feedback: I grade each of these immediately, and these grades are posted on
our course
management system – i.e. available on the Internet for each student to know
how s/he has done
on this specific posting and on the overall assignment.
-
Extending the “learning attention curve”: students think actively about
course material outside
of the classroom, prior to class, as well as after class when other messages
are sometimes
posted. Learning is not limited to the time frame of the classroom meeting,
let alone the limits
of place.
-
Public speaking – although a relatively minor goal in this instance, the fact is
that students
know they will be asked to discuss their own posting, or to ask a question of
someone else
during the class, and they get much better at it as the semester proceeds.
-
Substantive content: lest anyone think this course is ONLY about process
and life-long
learning skills, the content goal is to encourage students to read before class;
messages reveal
shortcomings students might have, before class, and let me work on those
issues more
efficiently.
5
I created the message board assignment for the more or less principled
pedagogical concepts
I’ve alluded to earlier and have just outlined in more detail above. But I also
use this assignment
because of much more practical reasons, two long-standing issues among
faculty in higher education:
how do we get them to do the (reading) assignment before class, and, how
do we get them to talk in
class? My development of this assignment owes a debt to the relevant works
of Canfield and Reeher
and of Green and Rose.

Canfield and Reeher discuss the use of a point system as the basic
assessment design for an
introductory course. Students have a variety of choices, and can simply
accumulate points in order to
gain grades in a course. They see this as an effective learning strategy in a
society characterized by
capitalist norms and notions of individualistic, rational self-interest. I agree.
In the message board
assignment, I use this principle (but I do not adopt this paradigm for the
whole course). But, though a
student can earn a B for the overall assignment by simply accumulating a
Pass for each scheduled
message board opportunity, they cannot earn an A that way. This semester,
for example, to earn an A
requires an accumulation of seventeen points – at one point per Pass posting
– but there are only
fifteen message boards.

Students need to do better than Pass on at least a couple of those boards,

while missing none,
or they have to find alternative ways of gaining points. This assignment is
not designed to be a torture
device, so you will be relieved to find that there are alternative ways to earn
points. The more popular
one among my students is simply extra message boards. These usually
coincide with events outside of
the classroom: the showing of film X, a panel on topic Y, a lecture by
distinguished visitor Z, etc. If
students attend these events, the can post a message to an extra message
board created for the
occasion. It is less important to me to know if students attend these events
and then post a message
because they are wonderful humans by nature who will take advantage of
any learning opportunity, or
if they attend because they want to earn a point towards a grade. But
incentives do work.
Green and Rose describe getting students to talk (and read) intelligently as
“The Professor’s
Dream.” I agree. How to achieve this in a discussion class? Their simple
answer is no less valid for
its simplicity: let them prepare. They recommend a constant flow of thought
questions, designed to let
students have some specific things they can work on before a class meeting.
They further encourage
this behavior by weighing a Participation grade very heavily -- “15-30
percent of the course grade”
(688) – to get students to adopt this “partnership” they are proposing. But
even then, they argue:
…the success of this method is much more dependent on the creation of a
classroom atmosphere within which students feel comfortable taking risks –
answering questions when they are not entirely confident they are right – in
front of you and in front of their peers. (688)
When the atmosphere is cordial, when students learn that all humans -- even
students, let alone
professors -- make mistakes but survive, we eventually create a context in
which even shy and/or
struggling students begin to feel that it’s okay to participate. My experience
suggests that once
participation during class is the norm, student preparation for class becomes
rational and in their self-
interest, and they will now act accordingly, if they can. One cannot control
all the variables, but it
seems to me that it is incumbent on instructors to create a structure that
encourages and even permits
pre-class preparation. In other words, to take this beyond Green and Rose,
thought questions are not
only an opportunity we can use to promote learning, good thought questions
beget a need for more
good thought questions. Students need them. The message board assignment
I rely on adds another
dimension. Part of pre-class preparation, for both students and myself,
includes a chance to see
student answers to those thought questions.

In sum, my spin on the message board assignment is that it draws on certain

pedagogical
principles and practical concerns to provide students with the incentives and
the situation in which
they can learn more, at many different levels. I feel they learn more about
the substantive material,
even if we don’t “cover” as much, and I feel they develop certain life-long
skills consistent with the
liberal arts model.

As you may by now recognize, I am convinced this is the right way to go

pedagogically – there
are many benefits. But before you become convinced, we should look at
some of the “costs.”

4.
How it Works – Practical Implications
As instructor in a course using message boards intensively before class
meetings, my work
falls into two categories: reading the posted materials and integrating my
thoughts about the postings
into specific class preparations. I still need to do other conventional class
preparation activities – but
at least I don’t have to prepare or rehearse lectures. But in short, the message
board assignment
requires work, and time.
As noted above, this is a graded activity, albeit essentially pass/fail. What
this means in
practice is that I must print out postings before class, read them, assign a
grade, and record that grade.
In smaller classes, I will often print each student’s message separately,
comment on them, and hand
them back at the start of the class meeting. I prefer doing this, because they
then have instant
feedback, as well as their post at hand should it become part of a discussion.
In larger classes, concer
or the trees being demolished often leads me to print just one archived copy
of all postings, i.e. one
single document, which our software creates, that allows me to read all the
postings in one single
document. These archived compilations generally run to about a dozen pages
or so. In this scenario, I
have all the materials at hand in class, but students don’t.
6
The “art” of this technique, however, lies in the ways an instructor uses the
content of the
messages. There are many possibilities. One might discover what points in
the reading were not as
well understood as one would want, and spend class time accordingly. Or, I
sometimes discover that
parts of the readings were well understood, and hence need not take up much
class time. Once the
semester begins and students become more acutely aware of the relationship
between their posts and a
major course grade, I instruct them that to get more than simply one point
for a Pass, they should
incorporate material that shows me they can connect with or incorporate
material from previous course
materials. Or, they might bring in personal experiences that shed light on
their understanding of the
thought question prefacing the message board. I find very interesting
insights into how students
connect a specific reading with another item in the course’s materials; or
how they connect text
material with current events.

When students do provide this material in their posts, many discussion

topics suggest
themselves. Since my goal is to encourage these “higher order” analytic
skills, I use these posts and
the topics they suggest quite extensively in the discussion classes. In sum,
far from having to wonder
how a discussion will be focused, my experience is that I continually run out
of class time before I can
adequately mine this treasure trove of student input.

The second component of the “art” of this type of assignment is the nature of
the thought
question for each message board. It is important to remember that the
question must not simply look
for objective material they can look up – or copy from earlier posted
messages. Questions should
provoke some analytic reflection: “Watch Speech X (perhaps you have a
segment from C-Span) and
see if you can discern the ideological orientation of the speaker, in light of
our course text…..” In
other words, if you ask them to post a message telling you what the four
main points of Chapter 3 are,
you’ll get bored, and so will they. If you ask a thought provoking question,
you’ll enjoy what you
read (perhaps in spite of always being rushed to get these tasks completed
before the class meeting).
But besides avoiding boredom, you’re likely to find all sorts of inspiring
topics, as mentioned above.
These will let you, with a little practice, learn to come to class with a half
dozen discussion topics
ready, any one or two of which could take an entire period.

Class meetings have a different atmosphere when there is a message board

being used as the
basis of the discussion. First, students seem to feel free to ask questions,
having asked them already,
in many cases, on a message posting. Occasionally – less frequently than I
would like – they actually
pose questions to each other. Students will have done the reading, most
likely, and will have thought
about it at least a little: the ground is actually more fertile for your insights,
in depth comments, etc. I
often ask a student what she meant by a sentence in a posted message, and
the class will take off on
the topic: she feels good because her posting has had a role in the class. And
the discussion that
ensues is likely to be profitable because other students have read her posting
before coming to class
At the pedagogical level, in sum, this style of teaching means that class time
is usually spent on
higher order analysis, reflection, synthesis of material with earlier lessons or
outside material (like
current events). Far less time is spent on primary presentation of material;
and what time is spent in
that pursuit is more effective, because I have read the posts with this concern
in mind, before class.

I turn now to some data from the students.

5.
Assessment
This section is a brief report on student evaluations concerning the impact of
the use of
electronic message boards on their learning in my courses. In the
questionnaire, students were asked a
variety of questions about technical difficulties, the suitability of the
assignment’s difficulty, the
amount of time involved, the impact on their learning of course materials,
etc. Data were collected by
means of an anonymous questionnaire at the very end of the semester;
responses were held by a
student until all grades were handed in.
The methodology in this evaluation is not sophisticated and can be faulted in
at least two ways:
there is no control group nor is there any external objective measure of
“learning.” Yet the self-
assessment data seem relevant to the basic question of the impact of this
assignment on student
learning. Absent a more refined experimental model, the data here are at
least heuristic.
7
Any assignment using the computer and the Internet run into questions of
access and training.
My survey supports our stereotype that students are at least a generation
ahead of the rest of us: 90%
had no technical problems at all either with access or with the nature of the
assignment. Of the 10%
who did, all mentioned computer technology problems, typically that they
could not get to a computer
lab on campus in a timely fashion or that their personal computer was not
functioning for a time
during the semester. None thought the assignment itself was technically
unmanageable, which,
frankly, was a relief to me. In the past four semesters, I have had to conduct
a “workshop” for this
assignment only once, for one student. I have never felt the need to spend
more than five minutes of
class time, once per semester, to explain the technical aspects of this
assignment.

One does not want to overburden students, although we do want them to

work in our courses.
In this survey, 94% thought the assignment was appropriate in its level of
difficulty, seven respondents
thought it too difficult and one thought it too easy. 86% thought the
assignment took about the right
amount of time, 9% thought it took too much time, and five respondents
thought it took too little time
to be effective, an interesting observation on their part. When asked how
many minutes it took
students to do this assignment, not counting the reading or viewing of the
assignment itself, the range
was from ten minutes through 120 minutes. The Mean was forty-one
minutes, and the Median was
thirty-five minutes. Of the 128 respondents, 78, or 42%, answered twenty,
twenty-five, or thirty
minutes, and 23, or 12%, answered sixty minutes. In short, there is a bi-
modal distribution around the
half an hour and one hour answers. My own impression, based on the
content of postings generally, is
that it probably takes students a little less time, and that these self-
assessment data are perhaps slightly
higher than what might be obtained “objectively.” Regardless, my point is
that this is not an onerou
assignment in terms of its technical difficulty, its content difficulty, or the
amount of time it takes, and
that most students concur.

In terms of having students read and communicate with each other via this
medium, the results
are mixed: 84% of the respondents report that they regularly read at least a
couple of messages from
other students, and a few, ten, report that they regularly return to a message
board after their own
posting to see what other students posted after their own. Composing a
message in reply to another
student’s post requires more work than simply reading that posting, yet 51%,
a majority, reported that
they often post replies to other students’ posts.

The key question for this paper is of course the impact of this assignment on
their learning in
the course. Students were asked if they felt that the Message Board
assignment “helped your learning
in the course?” To this question, students had the following choices – the
percentage who chose each
answer is included:
Yes, it was a major factor in my learning in this course: 34%

Yes, it helped, but it wasn

=
t more important than other activities: 50%

Yes, but it really wasn

=
t as helpful as many other activities: 7 %

No, it didn
=
t really make much of a difference one way or the other: 9%

No, in fact, it hindered my learning: 0%

Together, the first three responses above total 91.4%.

These respondents were asked further to rate the importance of several more
specific ways they
thought the assignment had helped. They had four choices, and could rate
each of these from most to
least important. The choices:

It helped motivate me to read assignments before class

The board’s question helped me focus on key parts of the readings

Other posted messages were an important source of learning for me

Posting is an active step, as opposed to just reading and listening

Table 1: Percentages of respondents rating choices as most to least
important
Choices Most
important
Less
Important
Still less
important
Least
important
Motivate to read
32.0
22.7
17.2
20.3
Focus reading
23.4
32.0
23.4
13.3
Other messages
19.5
11.7
18.8
42.2
Active step
17.2
25.8
32.8
16.4
Note:
percentages are based on the full sample of 128 students. Column and row
totals therefore both round to
about 91.4%, the percentage of the 128 respondents who stated that this
assignment did help their learning in
one of the three positive ways included above
.
In Table 1, reading across shows the distribution of these respondents on any
one of the four
choices. Reading down, we see the distribution, among the four choices, of
the “most important
esignation. The table suggests a couple of interesting findings. One, to my
satisfaction, students
clearly feel that this assignment motivates them to prepare before class, and
they see this as important
in helping their learning.
8
A second observation is less positive. Students clearly feel that the content
of other messages is less important in affecting their learning positively,
suggesting that as currently
structured, the assignment is perceived as a unilateral message to the
instructor, rather than a sharing
of knowledge across the group. This is perhaps not surprising, given that this
is a graded assignment
and I do the grading, not them. Yet, I would like to have more of a positive
rating for this choice.

Finally, a summary overall question: when asked if the assignment should be

continued in
future semesters, 88% said yes, and another 5% said yes if certain
modifications were implemented,
i.e. 93% of the respondents thought it should be continued as an assignment.

6.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have sought to describe my basic approach to pedagogy; the
message board
assignment I have come to rely on heavily in my teaching; what this
assignment means, in practical
terms, for my day to day work as an instructor; and some data from students
who have worked with
this assignment. While there are clearly aspects of this assignment that still
need work, these data
support my conviction that using this technique can be a positive
supplementary step in our classroom
instruction techniques. My findings certainly support Hake’s main
conclusion: students engaged in
interactive work learn more.
9
The work-in progress part of this assignment, for me, is how to create a
structural context that
will more successfully take into account our students’ liberal-capitalistic
“human nature” so as to
transform their learning experience into a more communitarian process that
is truly effective, not
merely touchy-feely. My main conclusion after using this assignment
heavily for several years,
however, is that it has led me to a new way of teaching and interacting with
students, a far more
rewarding pedagogy than I had experienced previously.

Finally, while the ideas from works cited earlier inspired and informed the
development of this
assignment, it is worth stressing that the assignment is possible, as I run it,
because of computer
technology and course management software. The message board
assignment speaks powerfully, in
my view, to the potential role of technology in higher education, even in
traditional face to face
classrooms. While we are justifiably enthusiastic about the Internet as a
medium for the dissemination
of (course) materials, I want to stress that this relatively simple use of the
Internet as an inter-active
medium offers us a wonderful opportunity to refine our pedagogy to
improve student learning. I hope
my efforts, as described in this paper, have helped in this endeavor