I also included on the discussion board a specific thread for questions to begin to mirror the question/answer process of the traditional classroom (all students may benefit when one student asks a question) and to invite students to act as co-teachers responding to the questions posted by their peers. In addition to remaining active all semester, allowing students to come back to the questions/answers as often as they would like, I believed that this thread would allow me again to reinforce the idea of civic rhetoric in the online writing course.
My expectations led me to guess that I would receive fewer individual emails from students and that students would begin to see the benefit of the question thread both from their continued posting of questions and responses as well as their responses on the surveys. To my disappointment, the Questions thread was not used widely by students, and the same small group of students both posted and responded to questions over the sixteen week semester. In the first section of the course, the thread included
- one hundred eleven (111) posts for the semester
- forty-five (45) messages posted by me as responses
- thirty (30) messages posted by one other student (both questions and responses)
Of the total posts, thirty (30) were actual questions, the majority of which were posted during the final month of the semester and only six students (5 female, 1 male) actually posted questions. In two instances, questions posted by students allowed other students to post related questions, either in response to the original post or to my response post, yet in nearly every case, I was responsible for responding to the questions posted to this thread.
In the second section of the course, the thread included
- thirty-four (34) posts for the semester
- sixteen (16) messages posted by me as responses
- six (6) total student participants, all female
Unlike the previous section, most of the question posts occured during the month of February, with only one post each in the months of March and April. Although it may not be unreasonable to conclude that students, especially those enrolled in the second section did not have many questions, my general email folder for each section included one hundred sixty-six (166) and two hundred forty-five (245) messages, respectively, the majority of which included specific questions from students.
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