Facilitator Classroom Material

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Robert Belford
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Facilitator Classroom Material

The purpose of this forum is to give the facilitators a place to post material related to the f2f component of the OLCC.

Robert Belford
Robert Belford's picture
POGIL
Comment: 

Folks,I think the OLCC may be an ideal place for POGIL type activities.  I know POGIL is sort of polarizing in the chemical education community, but this may be the ideal place for it.My vision would be students work in groups, with the roles of the group rotating, and only after they have engaged in a group level activity do they post questions to the lecturer's papers/TLOs. The guided inquiry part allows us to direct the group activities, effectively assisting in both their navigation of the curiculum content and interaction with lecturers.By design, part of the objective of an OLCC is to allow faculty to teach a course they do not have background knowledge to lecture on (without a huge amount of before class work), and so a directed POGIL activity that brings the students to interact with both the online posted material, and the lecturer's who authored that material could be a very easy way to run the f2f sessions.What do you think? 

Jennifer Muzyka
groups vs POGIL
Comment: 

I have attended multiple POGIL workshops and occasionally use POGIL activities in my classes.  I have never used the assigned role in groups, so maybe that's part of my problem.  My students REALLY don't like POGIL.  Last week my physical organic students unanimously requested to have a reading assignment over spring break rather than to do a POGIL activity on the Monday after break.POGIL assumes that the students can reinvent the ideas based on key bits of information provided in the handout, with no other mini-lectures or reading.  Developing new theories is not something that students will do on a daily basis after they graduate from college, but reading technical information is an important skill that our students need help developing.I use the JiTT approach in my classes.  That means I assign a reading that students complete before the next class period.  To make sure they actually do the reading, there's a quiz associated with the reading assignment.  I use their answers to the quiz questions to develop my presentation for the day.  During class, I regularly have students work in groups.  In these groups the students will work practice problems.  Sometimes they argue about the answers to clicker questions in their groups.  Other times they develop screencast solutions to problems.  Their screencasts are posted on our department YouTube channel.  My students never complain about working in groups.  But they always complain about POGIL.

Jennifer Muzyka
students in discussion forums
Comment: 

Bob expressed concern about students posting questions to the discussion forum before taking the time to carefully think about the concepts.  I have been trying to get my students to use a forum in our course management system (Moodle) for years.  They are really reluctant to post.  One way to make them more comfortable posting is framing the discussion forum as an online review session for an upcoming test.  The second thing I've done that seems to help is to load the forum with their own questions by posting those questions myself when students email them to me.  I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not so worried about being overwhelmed with numerous student posts for this course.  Maybe my students are not representative and others have different experiences of getting students involved in discussion forums.  I would be happy to hear about how other instructors solicit that kind of participation.

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