Online Tools for Teaching: Online Discussion
Mailing lists are operated by a re-mailing program - often known as listproc, listserv, liststar, or majordomo.
Advantages
- easy to use
- proactive
Disadvantages
- messages get buried with daily correspondence
- messages get missed by "late" subscribers
- people get confused about subscribing and unsubscribing
- archives are normally difficult to manage.
To set up a mailing list, you can use the online form Setting up an Electronic Discussion Group at UVM
Newsgroups povide an alternative to e-mail which provids a more "bulletin board" or discussion group environment. All messages are stored on a campus server rather than in individual mailboxes.
Advantages
- messages are collected in one place
- messages to chemistry 1 are automatically separated from those to music 1.
- messages are available through a web-page
- subscriptions are easily managed; they do not require special action, and are not subject to e-mail changes
- late comers are not left out
Disadvantages
- may be unfamiliar to faculty
try to make a posting once per week period - an announcement, a comment about the readings, a hint about the assignment, a reading or study question.
a useful trick is to take questions that were asked during or after lecture and repost them as "question and answer". This helps set the stage for other students posting their questions directly.
when students have weekly assignments, problem sets, lab reports, journal writings, etc., the newsgroup can be a useful way to put hints, guidelines, suggestions, correct common shortcomings "in writing."
this is the most common use of a "discussion" group. Things get very exciting when thre is room for disagreement and debate; the instructor needs flame retardant skills - often rephrasing, summarizing, recentering.
news groups work best where all participants generate questions and answers. One way to stimulate this is to encourage students to brainstorm on their term projects. This could work if the individual projects are coordinates into an (online, of course,) class project -- e.g. something along the lines of a technical report, a journal, a guide book, a catalog, a city or campus plan,