Continuity with Curricula
Expectations, relevance, coherence, integration, assessment.
CMC is more likely to be successful if you give careful consideration to your reasons for using it with any learning group, and how you intend to fit in with, or substitute for existing student activity, introducing it to your students with these points in mind.
Expectations
You should not expect instant success, especially if the intended CMC activity is new to both students and to course practice. Some iterative trialling, evaluation and revision will be necessary before the best methods of framing your provision of CMC in any given context become apparent.
The impact of task familiarity on conferencing use is clearly important and care should be taken for the introduction of conferencing for tasks that your students have not encountered previously, for tasks that in their experience can be carried out much more readily in some other way, or for tasks that seem peripheral to their main concerns.
Relevance
The outcome in any of these cases could be a lack of take-up of the facilities on offer, or a diversion of their use towards some more meaningful purpose (from your students' point of view). This does not mean that use of CMC for innovation of teaching method or learning activity is an impossibility, but it will require careful planning and preparation.
It is easy to overlook how unfamiliar CMC may appear when it is first incorporated into a teaching programme. Some subjects may not lend themselves to its use because the reference points for productive discussion have to be more firmly "to hand" at the time of the discussion. This might apply to disciplines that are strongly lab-based or where study topics relate to artefacts arising from field work.
Yet even in these cases there is a potential to be realised through making objects and issues of common concern available from within the conferencing software. For example, you can provide access to important documents, images or other material - from within the discussion space itself.
Coherence
You may need to monitor cohesion between conference content and the underlying concerns of the course itself. Only the most focused of students is likely to keep a discussion firmly tied to the subject. Often, natural linkages to everyday life may quickly prove seductive such that the academic grounding of the discussion gets too disturbed. Again, this is a risk that you can avoid with effective monitoring and moderation, though sometimes you might chose to see such a 'lapse' as a feature, rather than a bug, and harness it accordingly in the service of learning.
Integration
At the most basic level, whether or not conferencing is seen as peripheral can be influenced by introducing some element of assessment of the activity that takes place, although the unfamiliarity of this may create problems initially for both teachers and students.
A final point to note is that student expectations can be shifted not only by changes in their direct experiences, but also indirectly via their awareness of experiences accepted by previous cohorts. If they know that this is how things have been done in the past, they are more likely to try to make it work themselves. In this way innovation can produce its own inertia.
Voices of Experience
A selection of 'Voices of Experience' - comments from learners and teachers - relating to this area are recorded in text format here (opens in a new window).
You can also access the sections for Continuity with Curricula within each subject area case study, which include similar commentary, from the links below:
3: Applied Psychology and Computing
4: Psychology and Information Technologies
Alternatively you can access each subject area case study in its entirety from the list on the left-hand navigation bar.
