OMDE 610 - Reflective Journal
Week Six - October 16th - 29th
Discussing "Lurking" and the Effective Use of Synchronous Tools in Distance Education
On the subject of lurking, I don’t believe that lurking should be a huge concern unless the students aren’t completing their other assignments. The students may believe that it is necessary to sit back and grasp what is going on in the classroom prior to posting their responses. Their lack of responses in the classroom does not necessarily mean that they are not participating. From my experiences as on online student, I’ve learned that we are assigned to read many articles. After reading those articles, we are expected to post responses into the conference areas that highlight on the subjects that we have read. While reading can be completed anywhere, I believe that in order to post meaningful responses, good notes have to be taken, and often, prior to posting my responses, I review sections over and over again before I finally post a response.
It takes more time than what is acknowledged to initially respond to conference postings, and then read through our peers postings to find a post that we can respond to, and with that knowledge, while it is ideal for students to post early in the week, it may be that they feel as though they need to reflect on their readings some more prior to making their initial post, and responding to their peers posts. A great way to evaluate a student to see whether or not they are really lurking is to carefully review their assignments to see if they have an understanding of the content that is being presented, and can effectively apply the content that is being presented in the classroom. I believe that one way to prevent students from lurking in the classroom is to provide activities that allow the students to use the various technologies that are available in the online classroom.
For instance, another topic of discussion this week is on the effective use of synchronous tools in distance education. If there appears to be students that rarely participate in the asynchronous discussions, synchronous sessions can be organized so that the students will have the opportunity to participate in discussions outside of the normal conference sessions.
This will give the peers, as well as the instructors the opportunity to interact with those students that may not participate meaningfully in the asynchronous discussions. As these synchronous discussions are taking place, the instructor can evaluate the quality of the responses from those that don’t normally participate in the asynchronous discussions to assist in determining whether or not they are meeting the objectives in the course.
Reference:
Beaudoin, M. (2003). Learning or lurking? Tracking the 'invisible' online student. In U. Bernath, & E. Rubin (Eds.), Reflections on teaching and learning in an online master program (pp. 121-130). Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg
