Attendance at Tutorials

This semester I have been monitoring tutorial attendance closely and contacting students who have not attended. A common response I have received is that, as attendance is not compulsory, the student does not think it is important to attend tutorials. I am astounded by this view. How do students think they will acquire the understanding necessary to successfully complete the assessment items if they do not attend classes?

Evidence of the lack of attendance is in the following two graphs:



My problem is: how do I convince students that attendance at tutorials is the most important factor in acquiring the understanding to successfully complete the assessment tasks? I do not want to set "participation marks" to force attendance when there is not a pedagogical reason for having a participation mark.

Balancing Study and Work

Contemporary Issues in Accounting is undertaken primarily by accounting students in the final semester of their degree.  Many of the students are working full-time in the industry.  Some of the students who are working full-time are also studying full-time.  I do not know how they intend to cope with the workload and pass.

Many students have told me that they are having difficulty balancing study and work.  I have been sympathetic with assessment deadlines for these students where their employer has verified that the student is required to work greater hours than expected.  But that is only a partial solution and is only effective if the excessive work commitments are for a few weeks only.  Extending deadlines is of no use if the excessive work commitments last for a substantial part of the semester.

Several students seem to think that work commitments are sufficient reasons for not attending lectures and tutorials.  While attendance at class is not compulsory, acquisition of understanding is.  Attendance at class is one of the key ingredients for attaining that understanding for most students.  I do not know how these students think they will attain the understanding if they do not attend class.  The materials provided to support learning are not designed to support distance learning, nor are they sufficient for that purpose.  They are designed to complement face-to-face delivery.  I do not know how to get this through to these students - announcing it in class is clearly a waste of time.

Students at Risk - Weeks 9 - 13

There were no tutorials in weeks 8-10 and there were no online tests running in weeks 10 & 11.

Starting in week 11, I continued my routine emails to students not attending tutorials.  I have now divided the messages into three standards:  A gentle reminder to students who have missed only 1 or 2 tutorials; a warning of poor performance to students who have missed more that 2 but less than half of the tutorials and a severe warning to students who have missed more than half the tutorials.  I have also sent SMS messages using the SMS manager system messages to students who have missed more than half the tutorials.

I sent emails to students who did not attempt the 4th online test and to students who performed poorly on that test.  A week before and again 2 days before the 5th online test closed, I sent emails to all students who had not yet attempted the test.  I also sent the message by SMS 2 days before the test closed.

I received greater responses to the SMS than I did to the email.  One student objected to being contacted by SMS.  Several students thanked me for the SMS about the test closing in 2 days.  About half of the students who received the SMS about tutorial attendance have contacted me.  Some of them are adamant that they will study their own way and will not come to lectures and tutorials.  Most, however have been promised to change their ways - while I have the promise, I do not have evidence yet of the promise being complied with.  This constant emailing and messaging has identified a few students with ongoing health problems impairing their performance.  I have directed these students to the supports services offered by the University and encouraged them to seek professional help.

Moodleposium Backchannel

The Moodleposium backchannel was brilliant. It was the first time I had participated in this. The backchannel was built using twitter with the hashtag #moodleposium. This twitter stream was aggregated into a coveritlive window on the Moodleposium Moodle site. The backchannel started several days before the event started and has drawn to a close several days after.

Lots of discussions and summaries of presentation on twitter - some RTs as well showing it moving to a wider audience.

The bad side of the backchannel was the appalling infrastructure the University has for this type of communication. It was an embarrassment - we looked like we were from the dark ages. There were inadequate powerpoints partially solved by ad hoc provision of a few powerboards. But the wireless internet connection was the worst. The wifi connection could not cope with the traffic demands and spat the dummy. Wireless broadband coverage was also poor. I could only get 2G coverage most of the time using my Optus dongle. This is just not good enough.

There should be sufficient powerpoints in the risers of the tiered seating and the WiFi system should be able to cope with 100s of simultaneous users. Also, 3G coverage from all major telcos should be available everywhere in the University.

Moodleposium Day 2

The second day of the moodleposium was the moodlepracticum. It started brilliantly but went downhill from there - not really, I was the first speaker for the day. Nearly everything on Day 2 was really good.

I got good feedback on my 10 minute session on glossaries. As did the others - many asked if more of these 10 minute slots could be included in the future. Margaret Robson repeated her material from the Gaggle on templates. Minh-tam showed the work he had done on the home page.

The keynote for the day was presented by Moodleman - Julian Ridden. Julian talked about the advantage of FOSS vs proprietary. Proprietary systems include features which will help it sell to many users - do not customise for unusual applications. Moodle comes with less in the box but has numerous modules written by others to add to the vanilla. Moodle.org is where you find them.

The second session contained a talk on a Formative Assessment Tool by Derek Chirnside. I did not see any great value in this tool for UC. The second talk in this session was by Mark Drechsler from Netspot. He looked at the pros and cons of using external Web 2.0 systems, custom modules or moodle basic. The basic issue was one of features vs control. External systems eg Wordpress, Mediawiki contained much greater features but passed control to those organisations. Internal moodle features had fewer features but more control and fewer risks. Customised modules were in the middle. The final talk was by Megan Poore on the legal risks of external Web 2.0 systems. She raised EUAs, IP, compulsory use, safety, reliability of supply. Lots to think about.

The third session was a discussion chaired by Alan Arnold on what was good and bad in Moodle from a teacher's perspective. Good things was the ability to see the students' view and the forums. Bad points were the difficulties in assigning students to groups, the problems with themes and the lack of an email function.

The final session had a series of 10 minute talks. Matt Bacon showed how to use audio files in Moodle including the way it put in an audio control bar when you created a link to an mp3 file. Nifty trick of creating a link from a single space if you want to hide the download link. Graham MacKinnell showed the dialogue module and how to use it - hint - choose separate groups and send a welcome message to all participants to prime the system. Felicia Zhang talked about the reporting features and research available from the reports function. I will be talking to Felicia about how to capture and analyse that data.

Moodleposium Day 1

The moodleposium was a great success. I had expected about 100 participants from around Canberra. There were almost 300 participants from all over Australia and New Zealand.

Te first substantive session had Denise Kirkpatrick PVC OU UK talking about the implementation of Moodle at OU. The talk was interesting about how a large distance university dealt with an LMS selection and implementation. Most of it was not relevant to UC's situation though.

The second session I attended was by Amanda Burrell. Amanda talked about group work and the methods she uses to get it to work. She spoke with a lot of energy and showed some interesting examples of her students' work. Some of the things she used was to get students to submit, weekly, their evaluations of the performance of the other group members along with their journals. She said that this required 90 mins of marking per week. She also monitored team performance by using a 2 hour weekly class session for work on the group projects. I am not sure if Amanda's techniques can be applied in my discipline.

Also in the second session was a presentation by Kerry Trabinger from CIT. I found Kerry's talk very useful. The big ideas I took from Kerry's talk were:

1. You never get a second chance to make a first impression
2. Training and induction are vital
3. Facilitators need to manage the conversations initially by replying in positive ways that encourage further posts
4. Actively need to pursue lurkers to make them participants

The third session was by the founder of Moodle, Martin Dougiamis. His talk focussed on the improvements coming Moodle 2.0. He promised a beta in December and production release in time for 2010 academic year. The big improvements were in integration and facilitating the creation of mashups. He also promised a focus on pedagogy through the Moodle 2.x life cycle.

The fourth session I attended had presentations by James Strong and Martin Dougiamis and it dealt with technical issues. James covered the hardware and software requirements for hosting, development and testing environments, backups and disaster recovery and service level agreements. Martin talked about the technical issues involved in Moodle 2.0. The bad news was that all hacks written for 1.9 were going to break.

Students at Risk 6399 - Week 8

I have sent emails to all students who have not attempted the fourth online test. This email reminded the students that they have less than a week to undertake the test.

I have sent SMS messages using http://www.smsmanager.com.au/ to all students who have only attended one tutorial this semester. The SMS stated:

You have only attended 1 tute in Contemp Issues in Actg. You are at risk of failing. Please call me to discuss your performance. Andrew Read