My first reaction to Trinh’s communication issue is that appropriate community-building and teacher guidelines for students need to be put into place within the Blackboard community. She should create a dedicated space for public questions much like our 565A community on Connect; every other MET course I’ve been in has offered the same kind of space for student queries. Through encouragement of questions to be publicly asked in a specified forum, Trinh would certainly cut down on the amount of online spaces she should be looking in to remedy student queries. Secondly, with a course as large as this one, it might be a good idea to establish that peers may also feel empowered to respond to other peers’ questions if they know the answer. For questions that require more privacy, Trinh should specify that students ask them while sending to a specific email (either her campus email or Blackboard email) to alleviate those questions from going to two different places. If there seems to be a matter that is common across private email requests, she could make an announcement to alleviate the issue instead of replying to each individually with long-winded responses. When students post in the incorrect location, she could kindly remind them of the appropriate protocol for questions (to the discussion board or to a specific email) in order to reinforce management on this issue.
Trinh could also work to create some social presence within the course in order to strengthen the learning community. Garrison, Anderson, & Archer (1999) define social presence as “the ability of participants in the Community of Inquiry to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to the other participants as ‘real people.’” (p.89) By promotion of networking and story sharing within the student group, peers could also be alleviating one another’s questions and supporting one another in coursework, sometimes even in online venues other than the Blackboard discussion boards (social media, Google Hangouts, etc.).
Additionally, Trinh is hoping for learner-centred outcomes so I would suggest some flexibility in her approach to the differing student timezones. If lectures are being livestreamed, I see no reason why those livestreams cannot be archived and asynchronously discussed later. For example, if you record using Google Hangouts on Air, it will automatically archive to a YouTube channel. Those videos can be linked in a discussion forum and that can be an area that students can tap into while the event is occurring as well as after it is complete. This also creates a learning artifact that can be used in future iterations of the course. If Trinh is looking to make these discussion groups more meaningful to students, she could use Garrison, Anderson, & Archer’s (1999) strategy of breaking into smaller groups to provide more focused discourse on any topical issues. If she wanted to provide feedback in these scenarios, she could have those groups create a general report on their primary discussion points so that she didn’t have to read and give feedback to every single post.
Lastly, it’s not mentioned in the case specifically, but I would be under the assumption that qualitative student feedback for such a course would be a nightmare. In a student-centred environment, I would make the assumption that Trinh is not assigning quizzes or tests (I have not experienced any such assessment throughout my MET experience), but that she would rather provide students with enriching learning experiences through creative assignments. These assignments could be primarily group-oriented, and she could even include peer- or self-assessment components in order to aid her own assessment and feedback. Of course, not knowing the specifics of what would be included in an introductory museology course, I am unable to imagineer what such assessment and instructor-to-student communications might look like.
References
Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (1999). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105. Retrieved from http://www.anitacrawley.net/Articles/GarrisonAndersonArcher2000.pdf