Rethink the course, Trinh.

The number of students that are enrolled in Trinh’s courses has become totally unmanageable. She may need to start by considering the ways in which she is setting up her course and delivering the course content. In particular, what are the learning goals that she intends for her students to achieve, and does the course currently manage to support and guide students in meeting these goals? The course itself may need to be completely redesigned in order to accommodate the large number of enrolled students, or perhaps the course needs to be offered at multiple times during the term or semester, but for a shorter duration and with a smaller enrollment for each course.

As far as Trinh’s communication management is concerned, the need to streamline her accessibility seems to be the most pressing need. Instead of having multiple methods for her students to contact her to ask questions, there should really only be two: online discussion postings and e-mail. The benefits of creating discussion threads have already been discussed within our group, so I won’t get too detailed here so as to avoid being redundant. But creating online discussion threads would allow for all enrolled students to view the questions and responses of their fellow classmates before submitting their own, which would hopefully eliminate repeated questions being asked. The discussion threads would also allow for students in the course to answer and respond to each other questions, and this would help support the enhancement of social presence, as described by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (1999), that functions in a supportive context to develop open communication for building understanding within the group.

Trinh could help to manage the discussion threads by organizing these into groups according to topic, week, or technical vs academic queries, in similar ways to those experienced in the MET program. For any questions that are more personal or individualized in nature, Trinh should establish at the outset of the course a single means of e-mail communication, either through Blackboard e-mail or another e-mail address. She would need to be clear that any questions posted outside of these two methods would not be addressed and answered. As suggested in other postings for this week, creating an FAQ section would also be useful as a means for Trinh to share information about common queries, and these could be repurposed and posted at the outset of her next course offering to provide additional support and guidance for her students.

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