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[zuzu_]

I am teaching a six-week, three-credit online lit course that begins in a week. I have the course set up with 40% of the overall course grade comprised of discussions. I have definitely concluded that this is the best way to structure the the class. Expectations for discussion are clearly established and rigorous. There are maybe 15-20 discussion forums each week.

I had originally planned to grade every student's participation in every forum. This is pretty easy with Blackboard, and goes relatively quickly during a normal semester.  But since my class size is a little bigger than normal, and because the class is so compressed, I'm thinking this is going to kill me, and I'm considering randomly selecting, say, only FIVE forums to grade each week. Of course, students will be informed of this in the syllabus.

Do you see any problems with this?

The only thing that is perhaps giving me pause is the weight of the grade. It seems like this "spot-checking" might be less likely to be an accurate representation of student work.  What if someone runs out of time and skips a forum? Normally, this would have a small impact on the overall grade, but if I happen to pick the forum someone skipped, they lose 20% of their grade off the top.

On the other hand, maybe this motivates students to do their best work everywhere and gives them a sense of "higher stakes." Maybe it's good pedagogy.

[mountainguy]

Zuzu, when you say "There are maybe 15-20 discussion forums each week," do you mean 15-20 threads plus replies??? I'm not clear on that.

My experience with online teaching is limited to F2F classes with strong web-enhanced components, so feel free to take my opinion with a grain of salt. My initial reaction is that students will whine that randomly selecting some discussions to grade and not others is "unfair." (For the record, it seems completely fair to me. But I can easily envision it ceating more trouble than it's worth).

That having been said, I empathize with wanting to simplify grading. Maybe you can do a quick "quality check" of all posts worth some small amount of their overall grade (e.g., 10%) just to make sure that students are doing the work, and then have students choose their best two discussion threads they want to be graded more formally??

[glowdart]

Interesting question, and I keep changing my mind about my answer.  

I can see my students throwing spectacular fits with such a policy, but that just might be our campus.  On the other hand, it should tell them that they have to make good posts in all places.  (It just wouldn't prevent ours from whining to the high heavens.)  

Can you see each student's posts for the week all in one place?  (We don't have BB).  I can see the spot-checking working better that way since you'll have a visual sense of the quality or length of the rest of their posts, but I'm thinking about how spot-checking worked in my math, science and language classes that had homework sheets.  Anyway, that way, if they did just blow off one thread, then you'll be able to adjust?  That's going to get tedious, too, though.

I remember sitting in training and asking about the ability to grade individual posts vs. a set of posts, and a pretty lively debate erupted.  Our IT people urged us to grade holistically unless we were only requiring a couple of posts each week.  I chose to grade semi-holistically for the posting week across all forum discussions (rather than grading every single post).  Frankly, I have students who either post well, post crap or don't post, so the lines between an A, C/D, and zero are usually clear.  Sometimes you get people who have a bad week or are generally incapable of committing fully and thus make four good posts and four utterly s*** posts, and that averages out to a C in my mind (since the minimum is eight), but I do this fairly quickly.  I also don't mind giving them the benefit of the doubt on their posts.

A colleague here grades each post on the check, check plus, check minus, zero system and then converts those to grades on a weekly basis.  He used to grade each post based on points, but found that he was dickering around too much with the difference between an 13, 14, and 15.  Another colleague does this but then will give full credit to anyone who has at least five check-plus posts each week.  So, she goes through and grades each post, but then only counts the top five.  

In terms of the math, I guess I would lean towards grading perhaps half of the forums each week holistically.   That way, you'll have a better sense of the overall quality of their work across the thread, but also will urge them to get them all done without having to grade each post individually.  Plus, if they do miss or blow off one thread, then it will wash out in the final grade because it won't be worth as much.  

[larryc]

Of course, students will be informed of this in the syllabus.

The above is the only problem with your plan. Just tell them that you will grade participation--they don't need to know that you will not be reading every post to do so.

[oldfullprof]

My current webcourse gives 50 percent for participation, but I don't grade the individual discussion items.  I think the overall effect of that would be to stifle discussion.  (What I do is count the student's paragraph length contributions at the end of the course, then give those that are about one standard deviation in number above the mean an A, between one below and one above a B, and below one a C, if there's any effort at all.)  The discussion is based on the course reader, not the text.  I have the gradebook disabled in this five week course, but return their tests and papers with red intertextual comments.  (I hate the bubble program, whatever it's called - track changes?)  If they do many short discussion contributions, those are gravy.  I might give a slightly higher discussion grade.

[infopri]

Of course, students will be informed of this in the syllabus.

The above is the only problem with your plan. Just tell them that you will grade participation--they don't need to know that you will not be reading every post to do so.

My classes these days are delivered entirely online, and participation is a critically important (required) component of the course.  I don't announce in my syllabus how I arrive at the grade for this component.  One or two students per semester email me, all in a panic because they will miss or did miss a week of discussion (life intervenes) and they're worried about their discussion grade.  I tell them (honestly) that what I'm looking for is an overall pattern of engagement with the course material, rather than counting individual posts.  I keep up with the discussions, and I have a good sense of who's participating (and how well) and who isn't.

Also, our CMS lets me view the discussion posts in a variety of ways.  For example, I can follow each thread, which gives me the flow of the discussion (which is how I read the posts during the semester), or I can have the system show me all the posts (regardless of forum or thread) for a given student.  I find the latter useful at the end of the semester, to check my memory on how often and how well each student participated.  Does your CMS give you that option?

[zuzu_]

Some clarifications...

I have Bb, so I can easily view students' posts any way I want to.

This is an INSANE amount of discussion. It's a short fiction class, so every week there are 15-20 short fiction pieces, and one forum for each. Within each forum there are 5-8 threads (prompts). Students don't have to answer every prompt, but they do have requirements for participation in each story's dicussion forum. So if I graded everything, it's essentially the equivalent of grading 15-20 short essays per student per week.

I see what you're saying about keeping things vague, but I think that's asking for trouble with grade complaints because I need very clear criteria if this is worth 40% of the course grade. It is such a large and crucial component of the course--it just needs to be clearly spelled out.

I've tried the "portfolio" approach in the past (when I had WebCT 4.0 and it was terribly difficult to get a clear picture of each student's participation level), but that was problematic in that students could skip quite a bit of discussion and still come up with a spiffy portfolio. So then I have to go back and count posts in every forum, which sort of negates the convenience factor of collecting a portfolio, since at that point I could just skim the posts and judge for myself.


I appreciate everyone's thoughts and input so far. Keep it coming.

[polly_mer]

This is an INSANE amount of discussion.

I'm glad you aren't confused on that point because that was my immediate reaction upon reading your OP.

I see what you're saying about keeping things vague, but I think that's asking for trouble with grade complaints because I need very clear criteria if this is worth 40% of the course grade. It is such a large and crucial component of the course--it just needs to be clearly spelled out.

I, too, cannot advise being too vague because that is just asking for grade complaints on top of a huge amount of work that will already set students on edge (ask me how I know that one.  Go ahead, ask).

However, I will go back to an excellent post on the subject of discussion:

In a class like this, I count discussion as 40% of the overall grade. These are the criteria established in the syllabus:
<snipped beautiful, clear instructions>

You've told the students what is required to get a specific grade in exquisite detail.  I would go with the skimming/sampling approach to see who is doing what (surely you can tell A from B from ... using skimming).  If you feel a deep need to be completely honest, tell students that you use a skimming/sampling approach so that they must be participating at a high level to make the grade.  Point them to [edited to reflect what I think will be the complaints from students in terms of "fairness"]

In a class like this, I count discussion as 40% of the overall grade. These are the criteria established in the syllabus:

GRADING PARTICIPATION/DISCUSSION FORUMS

To earn an “A” for participation you must…
   Post to EVERY forum and leave no doubt in my mind that you carefully read EVERY assigned textbook chapter and/or viewed all required material
   Log in multiple times per week to engage in active, meaningful dialogue with other students in the Discussion Forums
   Address multiple discussion questions and write a total of at least 600 words in EACH full class discussion unit and 300 words for each serial episode in your small group
   Create posts that contain virtually no errors in spelling or grammar

To earn a “B” for participation you must…
   Post to EVERY forum and leave no doubt in my mind that you carefully read EVERY assigned textbook chapter and/or literary work
   Log in multiple times per week to engage in active, meaningful dialogue with other students in the Discussion Forums
   Address multiple discussion questions and write a total of at least 600 words in EACH full class discussion unit and 300 words for each serial episode in your small group
   Create posts that contain no more than a few errors in spelling or grammar

To earn a “C” for participation you must…
   Post to EVERY forum
   Log in at least once per week to engage in dialogue with other students in the Discussion Forums
   Address multiple discussion questions and write a total of at least 400 words in EACH full class discussion unit and 200 words for each serial episode in your small group
   Create posts without spelling or grammar issues that interfere with meaning

To earn a “D” for participation you may…
   Not post to EVERY forum
   Rarely engage in discussion with other students in the Discussion Forums; log in only once a week or less
   Write fewer than 400 words in each full class discussion unit or fewer than 200 words per serial episode
   Create posts with spelling or grammar issues that begin to interfere with meaning

To earn an “F” for participation you may…
   Not post to EVERY forum
   Rarely or never engage in discussion with other students in the Discussion Forums; log in only once a week or less
   Not approach a minimum of 400 words in each full class discussion unit or 200 words per serial episode
   Create posts with spelling or grammar issues that seriously interfere with meaning

and let that be sufficient.  I'm sure that you aren't counting all the words now, but are instead scrolling so that's possibly the only thing that you might need to change on your rubric in terms of "most of the time"

[madhatter]

I agree that this is an insane amount of discussion, especially if there is any other required writing for the class.

When I've graded online discussions, I have used a super-simple rubric. Basically, I'd scan each student's posts for the week. (I know that eCollege lets you go into the gradebook and see just a single student's posts as a block. I don't recall if BlackBoard has a similar sorting/filtering feature. BIG time-saver.) I would give them a single grade for the week, regardless of number of posts (as long as they met the required minimum). Although I wrote it up in fancier language for the syllabus, the rubric basically boiled down to 0 = AWOL, 1 = crappy participation, 2 = good participation. That was it.

[zuzu_]

The reason it's so insane is because it's a six-week course. There is really nothing else I can cut. I've regularly skimmed a little reading off the course here and there, but it's really not at all unreasonable for a three-credit 200-level literature course.

Students are given fair warning that they need to devote around 20 hours per week to this course.

[zuzu_]

Additionally...

The only other written work is a midterm essay and a final essay, each worth 30% of the final course grade.

Since it's so much discussion and the requirments are quite rigorous, I do feel the grading scheme needs to be more nuanced in this particular situation.

[polly_mer]

Since it's so much discussion and the requirments are quite rigorous, I do feel the grading scheme needs to be more nuanced in this particular situation.

Why do you feel that way?  I'm not saying that you are wrong, but if this were a f2f class, would you be recording everyone's every tiny contribution using a big rubric or would you write down a grade for the day right after class for your general impression of everyone's contributions with perhaps a note or two during discussion about people who made really great contributions?  Is it really any different to give an impression grade every three days (or whatever time period floats your boat)?

[zuzu_]

Since it's so much discussion and the requirments are quite rigorous, I do feel the grading scheme needs to be more nuanced in this particular situation.

Why do you feel that way?  I'm not saying that you are wrong, but if this were a f2f class, would you be recording everyone's every tiny contribution using a big rubric or would you write down a grade for the day right after class for your general impression of everyone's contributions with perhaps a note or two during discussion about people who made really great contributions?  Is it really any different to give an impression grade every three days (or whatever time period floats your boat)?

Good question. In a f2f class, if we discuss a story one day, it would be easy to note a quick participation grade after class. I know the students’ names and faces, and I remember who said what. I know who was brilliant, who was OK, and who was texting behind the giant designer knock-off bag. It would take one minute to give them all a fair and accurate ABCDF grade.

HOWEVER, if I read through an entire discussion forum, with 150+ posts from 25 students (multiplied by 15 each week), it would take many, many hours, and unless I took detailed notes, I would have no concept of which students were stellar, average, or poor, because I couldn’t keep them straight. Now in smaller online classes that last for sixteen weeks, I DO get a feeling for who’s who, but this simply doesn’t happen in an intense six-week class like this.

I also feel like I need to give them these smaller grades every week so they have a chance to improve is they are doing poorly. If they fail discussion, since it’s 40% of the course, they fail the course.

My other online classes are fairly discussion heavy (although not quite this intense). I have found that by FAR the best way to gauge and grade participation is to use the “grade” function within the forum, where I can easily see a block of just ONE student’s writing, skim through it, and immediately assign a grade right there on the same screen. I think it would be manageable to do this 5x per week for each student—it just would be hard to do it 15x per week per student.

[melba_frilkins]

I would combine grading of quantity and quality. Keep the portfolio, and make it worth 20% of the final grade. But then the other half of the discussion grade (20% of final grade) is based on quickie check-in style grading. For the quick grading, you would just eyeball all the posts to make sure they basically did what you asked (i.e., decent writing mechanics, addressed the topic at hand, and made minimum number of replies to other students, etc.).

Or you could do a different version of the random checking, which would be to do the quickie check in for all discussions, but be more rigorous on selected ones. Each discussion would still have the same point value (so you don't get the problem of knocking off too many points for the student who happened to miss the one discussion). I sort of do this without the students knowing it. That is, sometimes I run through the discussions quickly and surely end up grading more leniently that I would otherwise. Shh...don't tell them!

[rdnttkn]

It is an insane amount of discussion and my main fears would be 1) you'll burn out or 2) your students will or 3) both.

I find that if I dread something going into it, it only gets worse once I'm there.