A few months ago I wrote about a few of the effects of small class sizes in my undergraduate courses. I’m experiencing related problems in my online graduate courses, where per-class enrollments have dropped to only about a half dozen students.
With so few students, there is no actual conversation in weekly discussions. I fully understand and accept the fact that several factors probably diminish student contributions to discussions — these courses are online, asynchronous, and convenience for students is paramount. However, people did respond to each others’ discussion comments in previous semesters when enrollments were higher.
This is the first time that I’ve explicitly tied discussion posts to a rubric — at least two posts per week, with the first before midnight on Wednesdays, with cited examples from the reading assignments, to earn full credit — rather than vaguely categorize them as evidence of course participation. But making my assessment of students’ contributions to discussions more transparent should encourage rather than discourage posts, if it has any effect at all.
In sum, students are occasionally acknowledging the existence of their classmates but decide to forego interacting with them. They might be reading each others’ discussion posts, but there is no way for me to tell if this is in fact happening; if they are, they aren’t writing responses. Overall it seems unlikely that much social learning is occurring.