Like many of you, this year at Camosun has been my first year of higher education. I haven’t set foot on a college campus; I’ve only logged into one. But even with no real basis for comparison, I know that in-person school must be better than this.
I was told that the best part of going to university isn’t the lectures, the textbooks, or the professors: it’s you. It’s the students. It’s being thrown into the great thrashing sea of ideas, my naive thoughts drowning as waves of opposing opinion beat them down. It’s bonding with you as we are forced to forget everything we thought we knew about each other and the world.
But my experience with other students has amounted to little more than ships passing in the night. I’ve waved to them, and they’ve waved back, but nothing has gone farther than this. In Zoom “breakout rooms,” the silence is rarely broken. On the forums, most conversations fade once one participant has hit their weekly post quota. Surely we can do better. I was sold the idea of post-secondary as a torrential exchange of ideas. Sadly, I see only a trickle.
So what’s the problem with participation? It’s a two-sided issue, so there are two places we should look. Professors ought to plant the seeds of discourse, and students ought to water them.
Let’s start with professors.
The current incentive structure for online participation is flawed for several reasons. For one, there’s the focus on quantity instead of quality. Even if we must be graded for forum posts, why measure just the number? This incentivizes hitting the quota with minimum effort per post. Problem two is participation being overvalued in our final grades. In some classes, weekly forum posts account for 15 to 20 percent. If these are meant to be free marks, just grant them for free. They don’t encourage participation: research from University of Calgary instructor Nicole Boulais-McBain suggests that student participation stays the same regardless of the marks attached to it. Finally, problem three is that students have no hand in setting expectations; Boulais-McBain’s research also suggests that having an agreed-upon, and clear, definition of “participation” for students to agree on encourages participation and reduces perceptions of unfairness. Shouldn’t what we want out of our class discussions be something we discuss as a class?
Instructors should familiarize themselves with the research on grading participation. Consider lowering its weight and cooperating with students to design guidelines that emphasize quality over quantity.
Of course, we students must come to the table as well. We have to choose to talk to each other. I think that deep down we want to: isn’t it a big part of why we’re here? So we must stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It’s true, typing on forums to people you’ll likely never meet isn’t as satisfying as real conversations with “real” classmates. But it’s still better than silence, isn’t it?
Online school presents unique challenges, and our physical separation can make us forget that we’re still going through them together. Even if we’re on campus this fall, there’s still the summer semester to get through first. Those teaching, carefully consider why and how you grade participation. Those enrolled, participate. There are 1,000 internet forums hosting lively discussions on every topic imaginable between people who will never meet. There is no reason that a college classroom, a place meant to foster free speech and ideas, should be silent.