Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Rowena Santiago et al.
Only one student selected “Disagree” on the following survey items:
My role (both as reviewer and as responder) and the nature of my participation in the online
discussion were clearly explained.
I did more higher-level learning (analysis and synthesis, reflective thinking, critiquing, critical
thinking, etc.) in the assignment as a result of this online discussion activity.
My peers’ feedback helped me to produce a better project.
Twenty-five percent of the responses indicated that the online discussion was not conducted in a very
collegial, respectful and polite manner.
The results indicate that, as a whole, the online discussion experience was positive although a few
students considered the experience to be not as positive as the others. Also, readers should be
cautious in interpreting these results because the class size was small and because some students
responded to the survey more than once. These results are expected to be most meaningful to this
instructor who will then apply them in the next cycle of re-designing her online group discussions.
6.2.6 Reflections
As part of the faculty learning community, instructors were required to submit a reflection essay on
their experience. This instructor wrote the following:
“I found that having students critique each other’s work could help develop and
demonstrate student critical thinking skills. The guidelines our FLC generated were very
helpful for designing and developing a well-organized/structured online group discussion.
According to my survey results, four responses indicated that the online discussion was
not conducted in a very collegial, respectful and polite manner. Unfortunately, students
did not provide comments on the issue. In the future, I plan to (1) explain to students how
to conduct online discussion in collegial, respectful and polite manner before they
actually start online discussion and (2) revise my survey by inserting comments on each
survey item. I feel that being part of a faculty learning community contributed to more
effective use of online group discussion and the development of students’ critical thinking
skills in my course. The guidelines and the rubric the FLC generated saved me much
time in the assignment development.”
7. Conclusion
The challenge of supporting faculty in designing effective online group discussions was addressed in
this project through the use of faculty learning community because of its collaborative and synergistic
features on learning together and doing peer reviews, and its built-in implementation and reflection
components. Faculty participants were able to generate a set of guidelines for online group
discussions (which were conducted as class assignments), and then used these FLC guidelines in the
design and revision of these assignments to improve the alignment of learning objectives with the
learning activity and with assessment (rubrics), and for better management of the online group
discussions (logistics, organization, netiquette). The FLC structure used in this project put equal
emphasis on learning and practice (implementation of the re-designed assignments in the classroom).
This reflects the focus that was placed on the instructional design of online group discussions, a
practice that is supported by Yang, Newby and Bill (2008, p.1585) whose study concluded that “with
cautious instructional design, active dialogue may be facilitated, critical thinking skills may be
advanced, and the barriers to distance learning may be diminished”. Although the FLC was conducted
for eight months, a longer period would have been more desirable to give participants additional
opportunities to apply what was learned and share results as a community. A more formal evaluation
of the impact of the faculty learning community, through survey and interview of participants will be
the next phase of this project.
The integration of SoTL in the implementation of the project was also presented in this paper. It was
conducted by one of the instructors, whose goal was to gather information on how well the
instructional design of her assignment helped achieve the learning objectives (high-level thinking
skills) and the successful management of online group discussions, and then, as part of the reflection
component of SoTL, use this information to improve the next re-design (or version) of the assignment.
It is the demonstration of this complete cycle of “systematic design-practice-gather information-reflectrevise
for improvement-share” that is considered as the other significant part of this project.
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