Best Practices for Large-Enrollment Online Courses: Student Engagement with Peers

by Edna Pressler

When student enrollment increases significantly in an online course, instructors are well-advised to consider changes in three domains: instructor engagement with students; student engagement with peers; and assessment of student performance. Here we offer best practices for student engagement with peers, through the use of groups.

Groups

The use of groups can help instructors ensure that all students are provided opportunities for interaction that support active learning. The use of groups can also enable instructors to incorporate assessments that are sequenced, varied, and suited to the level of the course, without becoming overwhelmed with grading.

Choose random or self-enrollment: Enable Moodle to group students together or specify the basis for groupings (topic of interest, student time zone, etc.) and allow students to choose. Research suggests that group size should be limited to 5 or 6 members.

Group Discussion

Prompts: Choose compelling prompts that are aligned with learning outcomes and objectives and that encourage research, debate, and progress toward project completion.

Roles: Assign or allow students to choose roles for group discussions and projects. Examples include the following:

Leader: coordinates decision-making and communication outside of the discussion; they can reach out and encourage students to post for you or guide the team in a project.

Facilitator: creates the prompt that their group answers on the discussion board.

Moderator: guides the discussion boards with thoughtful feedback and questions; you may want to provide them with an assortment of guided questions.

Contrarian: purposely poses counter-arguments; they could help solicit varied viewpoints and deeper reflection.

Researcher: fact-checks posts and references on the group discussion board.

Communicator: summarizes the discussion or group work to the larger class.

Grades: Reserve qualitative grading (using explicit criteria) for discussion summaries and/or quantitative grading (participation points) for conversational discussions.

Group Projects

Guide collaboration: Provide resources and support to help students develop and adhere to group norms for communication and assignment completion. Inform students that you will ask them to assess the quality of their peers’ participation and contributions and you will adjust individual grades accordingly.

Encourage use of synchronous and asynchronous tools for communication: Virtual conferencing platforms such as Zoom (which is integrated into Moodle) can facilitate group work and create fluency with technology. A “Community Forum” discussion board can be used for students to hare problems and solutions.

Scaffold the content: Create activites that align with the course objectives and that complete important, sequential components of the overall project. Not all assignments need to be graded, nor do all graded assignments need to involve intensive review. Peer review activities, for example, are meaningful but do not require much effort for instructors to grade.

Leverage peer review: Provide resources and support to help students offer meaningful feedback on their peers’ work, aligned to the course objectives. Use a discussion board for informal peer reviews or Moodle Workshop with a rubric and exemplar(s) for more formal reviews. Students can use this feedback to improve their work before the instructor grades it.

Reference

Adapted from Loder, M. (2018, October 2). Best practices for large-enrollment online courses, Part 2: Managing groups, peer review, and other peer-to-peer interactions. Teach Online. https://teachonline.asu.edu/2018/10/best-practices-for-large-enrollment-online-courses-part-2-managing-groups-peer-review-and-other-peer-to-peer-interactions/

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