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I'm also a teacher of last year graduate students in marketing and commerce on internet courses. One of my classes is "New Technologies and enterprise organization". For a long time, I'm using this kind of tools (collaborative workspaces, wikis, etc.) to put the students in real usage position, and giving them only theorerical lessons.
The firts thing I did this year is to create a netcipia place for the class, invite all the students, and tell them now to manage themselves the organization of the place. They have the obligation to invite other teachers, administrative staff, and to organize the place to be:
- a repository of all the documents given by the teachers during the year
- a place of discussion outside the university between them and the teachers, and between the students themselves
Comments
- Each student responsible for selecting & reporting to class on 3 outside readings which they find for themselves. (Additional to assigned reading)
- Assignment to post a _short_ report on the reading, major points, student evaluation of the author's success in communicating worthwhile point(s), etc. Report not to be longer than 1 word.doc normal page of comment.
- Each student assigned to make comments or communication about 3 of his peer's review/reports.
TOPICAL REPORTS:- Each student (or team) assigned one instructor-defined topical report during the semester. Reports parallel and add to the curricular material.
- Each report is 2-3 pages in length; to be accompanied by one-page bibliography of student's recommended resources for info on the topic.
- Students to comment on and discuss each other's topical reports.
No assigned # of comments. TERM PROJECT:- Students assigned dates of "presentations" of their term projects to the class.
- Content = paper & biblio, results, demo of project if applicable.
- Q&A via email posts on each term project - detail, questions about approach, methods, lessons learned, etc.
The comments on each other's short outside readings reports brought out a lot of discussion, like in a live classroom. They got used to the method with the assigned # of reports, and the assigned discussion comments. There were no assigned number of comments on the other two assignment discussions. But now they were HOOKED on the practice. Result: There were 15 or 20 posts per day. LOTS of information exchange, application to real life, etc. A couple of instructor advisory notes about discussion the content, not much, really.- No "Me, too" kinds of messages - instead add to the discussion, bring up points, etc.
- Bring up meaningful or useful points.
- I informed them in syllabus that part of the grade was to be based on "contribution to class discussion." Again, that prompted the participation, until no prompting was needed...just the fun of exchanging ideas and information.
Unplanned result - I spent hours and hours reading everyone's email. Lots of them included questions to me about the topic of the discussion. Whew!