This presentation suggests ways for instructors and instructional technologists to foster engagement and interaction in online, small-group settings.
This project examines how online course design rubrics can offer heuristics for engaging students through asynchronous small-group activities.
As a new program administrator in the fall of 2020, I was tasked with building a template course for our first-year writing sequence, Writing Studies I and Writing Studies II. The course needed to be suitable for a variety of audiences: experienced composition faculty who were inexperienced in online teaching prior to COVID, faculty without pedagogy backgrounds, as well as part-time faculty not required to complete the significant (and unpaid) undertaking of an online course build.
The course needed to do many things for many audiences, but primarily it needed to be rooted in best practices for teaching. Although I had been teaching online for over a decade, developing such a universal course shell was new, a shell that would align to our program outcomes and ensured students would receive a rigorous and engaging introduction to academic writing, taught by faculty with many different interests and backgrounds.
In order to complete this task, I researched rubrics in online course design. And while rubrics were immensely helpful, both as a tool for course creation and an artifact to document best practices for instructors, our small, first-year student writing courses had somewhat different needs than many of the larger sections or graduate courses traditionally taught online prior to 2020. Thus, I wanted to learn more about designing rubrics that could better foster interaction and engagement in small group settings. Much of our work takes place in peer to peer or small group work, discussing assigned readings or providing feedback on writing.
I began my research with the following questions: how can we use rubrics to build engaging and accessible activities for small courses? How should quality course design differ with undergraduate students who may be at risk of attrition? Finally, how can we embody predictors of student success in online courses in the rubrics we create?
While writing instructors have long valued small group interaction, conferencing, and multiple opportunities for engagement with both peers and instructor, these ideas may not always be present in some course design rubrics. For example, time spent with instructor is a leading predictor of student success in any online course (Jaggars & Xu 2016), and it should be highly valued in an online course design rubric in an undergraduate course. Based on faculty feedback and student surveys, I establish heuristics for online course design rubrics that can be used by faculty as they developed their own courses or program administrators who wish to design a template course for use by faculty. These suggestions focus on ways that faculty can increase engagement and interaction in small-group settings. These findings will benefit faculty and other program administrators who design their own courses.