Discussion boards in learning management systems, particularly in the age of AI, rarely capture the authentic voice of students. In this episode, Greg Campbell joins us to discuss how the use of a chat application can motivate conversation and build community.
Greg is the chair of the English department at the Community College of Baltimore County and the deputy director of the Community College Humanities Association. He’s been teaching online courses since 2011.
Show Notes
Transcript
John: Discussion boards in learning management systems, particularly in the age of AI, rarely capture the authentic voice of students. In this episode, we discuss how using a chat application can motivate conversation and build community.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Greg Campbell. Greg is the chair of the English department at the Community College of Baltimore County and the deputy director of the Community College Humanities Association. He’s been teaching online courses since 2011. Welcome, Greg.
Greg: Hello. Thanks for having me today.
John: Thanks for joining us. Today’s teas are:… Greg, are you drinking tea with us?
Greg: I am actually an avid tea drinker. I was raised in a tea household, so I am enjoying a cup of Earl Grey at the moment.
John: Very nice.
Rebecca: Nice. I have just an English breakfast today, John.
John: And I have an Irish breakfast today.
Rebecca: Completely situated in the black teas today. [LAUGHTER] It’s not common around here, actually, for everyone to be drinking in the same ballpark.
John: It’s that time of the semester.
Greg: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Adding caffeine.
Rebecca: Yeah. So, Greg, we invited you here today to discuss how you’ve used GroupMe to facilitate more effective discussions in asynchronous online classes. Can you talk a little bit about the problem you wanted to address by this choice?
Greg: Yes, absolutely. Again, thanks for having me today. It’s a pleasure to be here. So obviously, with my work in an English department as well as with a humanities association, I’m deep into the humanities. And if you’ve ever taken a humanities class, you know that one of the biggest things we do in class is spend a lot of time discussing and having conversations with our students, and through this we’re able to build a common understanding, common knowledge, and ensure that our students actually understand topics that we’re covering. So I realize that this is something that we really need deeply in the humanities, not that it isn’t necessary in other fields and courses as well, but it’s kind of the bedrock of a humanities class is that you know you’re going to have a lot of discussion. And I realized [LAUGHTER] that having taught online for a long time and looking as a department chair at the results of online class, anything from attrition to lower grades, started asking myself, “Okay, we’ve got this outcome that’s low, and we can’t figure out why results are lower with students who take an online class. So, what’s kind of the problem here?” And I was studying MBE: Mind, Brain, and Education with Dr. Kristen Betts at Drexel, and realized that maybe the problem isn’t the outcome. Maybe it’s actually upstream, and we’re having problems with outcomes because we’re having problems with the original input. So I started looking at ways to identify how to strengthen the input, and I kind of had the moment of lovely clarity late at night working [LAUGHTER] when I realized that in English departments we tend to do everything in three stages in our classes. So we have the in-class discussion, and then we have what we call an informal assignment, which is like a short essay, maybe a response or something that we’re not really grading intensively, more kind of just making sure the students understand and are grappling with questions, and then of course we have formal assessments, which are the research paper and kind of thing. And I realized that the discussion boards that we were doing, and this is nobody’s fault, I think this has just kind of happened over time, and I know that this is a blanket statement, so it’s not everybody. But a lot of these assignments have started turning into, rather than discussions, it’s almost like a mini essay. So we’re jumping straight into the informal assignment, and we’ve never had that time to actually discuss and ensure that we have clarity amongst the students of: what is the subject at hand? Do I understand the terminology? Do I understand the broader scope of this? And so I realized that maybe the issue is actually an input, and there’s a very… and I’m really going to stress here,,, very basic way of looking at memory building, which is that we have sensory memory, then working memory, and then long-term memory. And sensory is kind of the input; working is what we hold onto for a few seconds, and then we have the long term. Well, the problem with the first step, the sensory memory, is that students in online classes weren’t necessarily getting that. They have to go and read things that are listed in the course shell. They have to go and do these things. We aren’t necessarily interacting with them to ensure that they understand the material before they’re doing these informal assessments. So yeah, I realized we just need to figure out how to get students talking to each other. And I had a faculty member, great guy, who introduced me to the GroupMe app, and I started using that in my classes just as an attempt to increase student participation. And I broke the students up into groups so that they’re actually in small groups, and class participation skyrocketed. Basically, what I do now is we don’t do the discussion boards the way we traditionally do in the LMS. I post the discussion prompts once a week into the GroupMe app, into each of the small groups, and then the students respond to the discussion there. Sometimes they do get off topic, but I relish that because I’m like, “Great. This is even more like what would happen in class. You’re having a natural conversation with each other,” so they’re able to build social bonds as well as interact with the material. And I’m in each of these groups, too, so I can see and offer guidance and insight is necessary, but the students are saying, “It’s less intimidating because it’s a smaller group. We get to know each other, and we’re building a sense of belonging.” And it just really enhances the student experience. And I’ll level with you, it also enhances the faculty experience because all of a sudden they start asking each other questions, and so the load on my inbox for my email goes down significantly as the semester goes along, but yeah, it was basically just to say one of the bedrocks of a humanities class is discussion. So how do we recreate discussion? And instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I said “where are students talking to each other now?” So we use this particular application. Now you could use anything. I mean, WhatsApp has capabilities. You could even set up your own groups if you want to give out your own phone number. So there’s a lot of other ways you can do this. It was just the application I chose because I had just been introduced to it and it fit the need. But I think there’s a lot of other ways you can mimic this just to get students in small groups talking to each other and talking about a prompt.
John: Why did you select GroupMe over one of the other apps, or over using small group discussion boards in Brightspace, which is what you use there?
Greg: Great question. I settled on GroupMe in part because they allow signups to use the app through email. So students didn’t need to submit their personal information to sign up for the application, everything’s basically kept confidential because they only need to use their school email address, which everybody would see as visible in the LMS anyway. So a student doesn’t have to surrender any personal information. That was one of the reasons that I landed on that. But the other thing is, and this is where again any other similar application would work, is that they don’t have to log into the LMS. So the application I chose does also have a web-based platform, so students could use their computer. But most of them just want it in their pocket, and then they get notifications. “So-and-so responded to your message. You have three new responses,” or something like that, so they’re able to respond a little more naturally rather than having to sit down and say, “This is when I’m going to do my work. This is when I’m going to think about these things.” So you’re actually almost getting that repetition of concepts into students’ brains throughout the course of the day because they get a ding on their phone, check it, want to see what their friends are saying, and reply, so it’s like an ongoing conversation. The other nifty thing with this is texting doesn’t work the way normal interactions do. I think some people see texting as synchronous and others as asynchronous, so it kind of falls into this gray area where students are talking asynchronously, but it feels more synchronous than I have to go log into my LMS and respond. So it just became a really powerful way that the students can interact with each other and get that constant feedback. And there are two other things I’m going to add here. One is they all said they appreciated that they got the notifications. Some faculty said “I’m getting a lot of notifications,” and I said “you can turn them off.” But for the students, they appreciate that they just get the small group notifications, and that drove them to get in to see, “Well, what did they say?” Because we all have that inherent like, “Ooh, there’s a new message. What’s going on? I want to check it out.” So you’re driving engagement that way. Also, it’s separate from their regular texting, so they know it’s different, but at the same time, it’s familiar. The second thing I would add is the LMS my institution uses allows students to post in a discussion board, and I don’t love this function, but it says how many people have viewed the post and then how many replies there are now you might have 17 people view your post and get zero replies, and that is to me rough [LAUGHTER], right? You’re basically saying 17 people looked at this and nobody wanted to say anything in response. Really, guys? So I think that fights against student engagement. Whereas with this application, if it was something that was hard to respond to, or somebody was just making a valid point, they don’t need to go in and just say like “Great idea, nice work.”They could just send a thumbs up that went directly onto the message, the way you do on most texting apps, or a heart or something like that. So even if they weren’t getting responses written, they knew somebody saw this and liked it, rather than somebody saw this and didn’t want to or need to take the time to type a response. So I think it also helps drive engagement that way because it’s a little drop of dopamine every time a student gets in there and sees a thumbs up on their post. So it was also really helpful to drive engagement that way, and the number of students who use those emoji reactions to react to somebody’s text was fantastic. I mean, we had so much feedback, and they were so supportive of each other. And that’s another thing where you get those smiles and nods in class. How do we replicate that when we’re looking online? We need to rethink the way that we would do that, but not completely. And so, let people text each other and send emoticons and thumbs ups and things like that to say, “I really like this point or excellent idea,” and it worked really well.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about some of the other privacy concerns and thinking about using an external tool? So, you talked about the importance of thinking about only disclosing an email address, but then we also need to think about what these organizations are doing with your data that you’re sharing or the things that you’re talking about.
Greg: So that’s where I will say another reason that I stuck with the application I used is that it is owned by a large trustworthy tech company that, if I recall correctly, used to be Skype and it’s owned by Microsoft. So there wasn’t a lot of concern with that. I also checked with my IT department to make sure that they approved and those kinds of things. But basically, what it all came down to was it was more secure, probably even than something like a WhatsApp because with a WhatsApp you’re giving your phone number, whereas here all you had to do was provide your school email address, and then I’m in each of the groups, so I’m there to ensure that, you know things can get off topic, but we’re not going to harass anybody or cause any problems. And fortunately, we’ve never had this instance, but if someone were to post something that were problematic, you could immediately remove them from the chat, which is really quick and easy. And something that I’ll add is I didn’t allow students to edit or delete posts. Part of the reason for that was I was worried that a student would post something distasteful or cruel, and I didn’t want them to then be able to delete it and say “I never said that” or edit it, so that was another way. And I told students that ahead of time. They see as well when they sign up. This is the way it’s set up. But yeah, there are ways that we can ensure that we have supervision over the class. But otherwise, it’s really no different than providing email addresses to each of the students and saying, “Email each other.” It’s just much more in line with the way students interact anyway, in that they’re just texting, so it comes naturally. [LAUGHTER]
John: Before we recorded this, you had mentioned that this project grew out of something you had done in your face-to-face classes earlier. Could you tell us about that initial experiment and how this grew out of that?
Greg: Yes, absolutely. So I can be introverted at times [LAUGHTER], and I am the student who would traditionally walk in, find the seat in the back corner, sit down, I raise my hand maybe once or twice a class to ask questions, but I was definitely the annoying student who would have time to think about what we discussed in class, and then start the next class with, “I just have a quick follow up.” And so I kind of felt like I needed time to digest material rather than just dive in. I teach at a community college where we’re teaching a lot of first-generation college students who it’s their first semester in college and they’re nervous. So a lot to balance there. So in my face-to-face classes, I realized that some students may be hesitant to raise their hand. They’re also very concerned, they’re 18 to 25, they’re concerned about image, and “I don’t want to ask this question. Is it stupid?” So what I started doing is what I call questions for the class, and this was probably 2012 I started doing this, and I still do it. But I just tell my students that over the course of the semester, through the LMS, there’s an area that’s an assignment, and they have to post 10 questions in there over the course of the semester, and if they don’t like interacting in class, that’s fine. Just post extra questions and questions for the class, and I’ll give you your participation points that way by considering that you’re still asking questions in this way. So it allowed students to actually have time to consider what they were going to say, and still participate. And those shy students are also still able to participate. Now, there’s also an added trick to this, which is that it is a dream for a faculty member. Because what I would do is, I don’t lecture in my classes, I mean, it’s an English 101, but I find that when I ask questions of my students, whenever possible, I have some prepared questions, and I post those into a PowerPoint just so students can see the question on the wall as we’re discussing it. But what I then do is also I take questions for the class right before class starts, paste them into that PowerPoint at the beginning. And the first thing I’ll do is I walk into class, talk for a couple of seconds, “How’s everyone doing? Great. Let’s see what the first question from your fellow students was today.” And I cluster them because I try to do paired reading. So I cluster them, but then I’m just saying to the class, like “These aren’t even my questions. This isn’t even what I’m asking of you. This is what you found as you were reading.” And what’s interesting is the students get jazzed, and it’s funny because especially the introverted students who you think are never going to fess up to “that’s my question,” they’ll be like, “That one’s mine,” and all of a sudden you’re building some more cohesion here, and the students are seeing, “Hey, we all have similar questions,” and I’ll even say we had three questions exactly like this, so you’re not alone in thinking that. Here’s the first one, here’s the second, here’s the third. So broadly, how do we want to deal with that? So I’ve always been interested in this idea of how can we leverage technology and not substitute it? And so what we’re doing here is saying I still want my students to ask questions in class, but let’s leverage technology and give them other options and opportunities for doing that. And the students are happy because they see their question on the screen and they’re excited by that. They all get to voice their opinion. The quieter students are able to participate the way they choose to, and every student feels like they’re represented then in the class because everybody at some point has a question that’s up on the screen, and also as a faculty member, easily the first half of class is done because I just copy and paste their questions, and then I pepper in the things that I need to based on the in-class discussion. So I’m still just running a class discussion, but they’re actually running the discussion, and I’m more moderating it, and that’s how we cover getting students involved, regardless of their comfort level, but also supporting them in building a comfort level. So I had already done this, and when it came to the asynchronous class, I was just thinking to myself, “How do I recreate these questions for the class in this setting?” And the best thing I could come up with was have them submit questions, and then I make that the discussion board, but then you have the same problem of… we whisper about this in the hallways, faculty and students… that everybody reads the first post and responds to that, and then the higher up in the queue, the more replies; the lower in the queue, the fewer, and they get kind of repetitive after a little while, [LAUGHTER] right? We all know. So I was just thinking, “I can’t keep up with constantly posting. Well, this got sent in this morning, and I know I had meetings all morning, so here it is this afternoon.” So instead, I thought, “Let’s figure out a way to put the burden on them to ask each other the questions, because they’re already doing it through the technology and getting my support with that.” And yeah, you know, it was anything to do to drive engagement that I could come up with. I mean, we have to remember they’re college students. They want to socialize, they want to make friends, they want to connect, and I will add, they want to connect with the faculty member, and they appreciate having the faculty member in the chat too, because then they can also just private message you if they need to and get direct connection to you that doesn’t feel as formal as an email. So this was all driven from the premise of, “Okay, this is how I did it in the face-to-face classroom. I need to replicate that questions for the class and the discussions. How do I bring that in?” And then I was introduced to the GroupMe application by Dr. Ibarrola and he used it just to keep in touch with us because I was in a small class of just six students, and he was like, “Let’s just use this. It’s an easy way for you to get a hold of me.” So we just used it to ask him questions in a statistics class. But all of a sudden, a light bulb went off over my head that was: “Wait a minute. [LAUGHTER] The students can interact through this, ask each other questions through this. I can still monitor and make sure that they’re safe, and nothing crazy is happening.” And yeah, it just developed from there, and it was a great study. We had a lot of fun with it.
Rebecca: As you’ve been talking about the transition from what you were doing in your face-to-face classes to trying to move towards a more synchronous type of conversation in an online class, I was thinking about opportunities that I’ve had in classes where I move towards using something like Slack or gchat in a project-based class, where you need the opportunity to have real-time exchanges, but also the more asynchronous dialog, as opposed to a discussion board. It doesn’t have a structure similar to a conversation at all [LAUGHTER]. Like no one talks in threads. [LAUGHTER]
Greg: No, and I love the idea of Slack too, because that can also prepare students for the workplace, and particularly if you’re having them do group projects, the idea of this is the way your projects are going to work in the future. I think that’s fantastic. But the idea here was it was low-level implementation for first- semester students, and like you said, when I read through discussion board prompts in other classes or past classes I’ve taught where there’s seven paragraphs with citations and references at the end, and I say, “You would never talk this way in class. This is not a conversation.” So I used to even get mad at my students and be like, “Stop writing paragraphs! Keep it brief.” But I think there’s almost this sense of well, that’s not the format of a discussion board. They’ve been inherently taught that discussion boards are multi-paragraph, what I would call an informal assignment. Whereas texting, they know how to text. They know that paragraphs are unacceptable. Like if you’re sending a six-paragraph text, [LAUGHTER] nobody’s reading it. So the format matches more closely with conversation, and that’s what I liked about it. Just as you said, and I just can’t agree more with that like nobody talks the way a discussion board is actually fashioned. So we need those discussions, but how do we rethink the way we’re doing those discussions and format it in such a way that it fits both the modality as well as will get student buy-in.
John: So when you started to use GroupMe, you also decided to use this as a research project for your dissertation research. Can you tell us a little bit about how you designed the experiment that you used in your study?
Greg: Oh yeah. So things are about to get complicated [LAUGHTER]. I gathered a lot more data than I probably needed, but it worked out in the long run. So the way it was designed, and I can tell you also, we had some issues along the way. So it was originally going to run in a 14- or 15-week semester at an external institution. Then we ran into some barriers with that, and we were going to run it at my own institution in a 15-week semester, and then it was too tight. So I said, “What about a 10-week semester?” And I already had research being done for others at the institution and other individuals with all of the classes that were 10-week classes. So I ended up doing seven-week classes and worked with the faculty members to explain if you have problems, you need to go to a coordinator or the dean. So we made sure it was ethically handled so that I wasn’t supervising these folks. And they were fully online classes taught by adjuncts, which I tend to oversee the full-time faculty more, and I have coordinators who oversee the adjuncts. So I made sure there were layers of protection that there was nothing getting in the way. So there was a little bit of a time crunch that we were now in a seven-week class. Also, I will say it was a spring second seven-week class [LAUGHTER], so we had a little bit of attrition as well [LAUGHTER], which is understandable. Yeah, so the study was designed in a manner in which I did a pre- and post-survey. So the pre-survey was a series of 10 questions, and then the post-survey was most, but not quite all, of the community of inquiry framework questions. And then the 10 pre-questions were also taken from the communities of inquiry theory, and we also had some open-ended questions for students. So the first step was the quantitative data, which was gathered through Likert scale questions in the pre- and post- surveys. Also, during the course of the seven weeks, I collected and coded all of the data from the GroupMe chats and coded all of the GroupMe chats using NVivo coding. Then [LAUGHTER], still not quite enough… the plan was to have one or two focus groups, but it was hard to get students into a focus group over the course of seven weeks. They already had a lot going on, so we made the decision to change from focus groups to individual interviews, and I interviewed four students and three faculty members. So it was the two faculty members who taught the classes, two intervention courses, and then one that was a control. And then those transcripts were coded through NVivo, and then everything was brought together, triangulated for results. So it was quite a complicated summer [LAUGHTER]. A lot of coding happened, but the results were fantastic and supported by faculty and students alike. I will never forget the first interview I did. I was like, “Okay, I want to make sure students have a sense of support and belonging, and that they like the GroupMe application because that’s what they’re stuck with.” And the first student I interviewed… I said, “So tell me how it’s going” And I kid you not, the student just said, “It’s just giving me a real sense of support and belonging.” I was like, ‘All right, we’re good, [LAUGHTER] wrap it up!” . But no, the only negative comment I actually received from a student was, it was a question about discussion boards, and the student said, “I really don’t like the discussion boards. However, I enjoyed the GroupMe. We could have done more of that.” And I just giggled to myself and thought, “You didn’t even realize you were doing discussion boards.[LAUGHTER] You were doing them the whole time.” So yeah, all in all, the results were really positive, and I should know this number off the top of my head, but I can get close, which was… I believe there was one question that was in the post survey: “I feel more connected to my classmates in regards to non-academic subjects or non-academic interactions.” And the control group fell from about 50% to zero, and the intervention groups went from 30% to 80% so one dropped by about 50% the other increased by about 50%. And so just building that sense of connectedness, and what I will say, I think maybe the most interesting outcome of the study is what I call the social-emotional-belonging fabric, and basically, I think of it in this term of if you know like physics and astronomy, there’s this idea of the space-time fabric, and that everything sits in this space-time fabric. And to me, that’s what this social-emotional belonging is: that you need to build that social-emotional belonging, and then the students will be more willing to interact over the course of the academic materials. But the academics can also then reinforce the social and emotional belonging if they’re connecting when they’re doing the academic work, as they do in those small groups. So to me, it was that for a synchronous online class to really be effective, we need that baseline fabric. We need the students to be interacting with each other, to be building bonds, and to be comfortable with each other, and then we have the fabric upon which we can build the other structures. But to me, that was the most interesting thing: that every student and every faculty member just talked about how the students were more connected with each other, and that led to stronger connections with the material. So I think that we maybe need to think about “How do we reconceptualize asynchronous online classes so that the goal is to establish that fabric and then put the structure of the course on that fabric?” And that to me is where we need to go, maybe in the future, as we reconsider the possible ways of structuring asynchronous online classes.
John: A couple of clarification questions. One is, you mentioned a control group. Am I correct in assuming that the control group was a class that used traditional discussion boards instead of using GroupMe?
Greg: Correct. Yes.
John: And another is: not all of our listeners will be familiar with qualitative research or with NVivo.
Greg: [LAUGHTER]
John: Could you describe what NVivo is, just to fill people in?
Greg: Yes. So NVivo is a process by which you can do coding. I’m using it in this sense to describe a coding system. So basically, what you can do is you can code material in many different ways. There are whole handbooks on how to code. There are different styles, systems of establishing what you’re looking for. And coding is often done in two cycles. So you go through it one way, and then when you’re all done, you say, “Oh, good heavens! I have to do all that again.” And then you do it all again a second time with a different coding system. So I can tell you what I did was for the GroupMe transcripts as well as the open-ended responses and the pre- and post-surveys. I did what’s called a priori coding. So that’s where I took existing terminology and vocabulary, and I used a lot of terms that came from social and emotional belonging and the community of inquiry framework. And I looked for keywords or themes that related to those and anytime you come across one of them, you kind of highlight it. So with my first round of coding in the pre- open-ended responses, the post- open-ended responses, and the transcripts, I did that a priori coding. Then I followed up with what is called descriptive coding for the second cycle. This is where you’re describing what the students are doing. So I might have keywords that are things like supporting each other, student-focused support, or peer-to-peer support, something like that. And then anywhere you’re seeing that the students are doing that peer-to-peer support, you highlight it, and then you can compare, “How often am I seeing this peer-to-peer support populate in the transcript for the intervention groups versus how often do I see it populate in the transcripts for the control group?” And now I did one other thing which I thought was kind of a little nifty. I finished with descriptive coding as the second cycle for all of that material, but then for the interviews, I used those same descriptive codes as the first cycle of the interview transcripts so there was kind of an alignment there. And then for the second cycle, I did what’s called values coding, where you look at what are the things that they’re saying they find valuable as a value or an emotion or a belief, and you try to focus on those kinds of things. And that, to me, was good for the interviews because it got to the heart of these are the things that you’re talking about, so they’re important, whether they’re positive or negative. If these are the things you’re talking about, these are your core values, and these are the things you valued in the course. So that’s why I used that as the second round of coding after I made sure that I had some alignment because I had so much different qualitative material that I just needed a way [LAUGHTER] to make sure that it was all aligned, or I was going to go crazy. So it’s a process, and then basically what you can do is look at, and then this is what we call triangulation: is you look at the quantitative results, and so I can say, “Okay, quantitatively, according to the Likert scale questions, students believed that working in small groups was a positive,” and then you go over to your qualitative and the codes, and you try to break it down into bigger themes. And of those bigger themes, you say, “Well, this theme relates to this qualitative code or this qualitative outcome and so here, the qualitative and the quantitative match.” So I’m getting qualitative results that say that the students like the small groups in the interviews and in the chat transcripts we also got that. So if those results align qualitatively and quantitatively, that’s what we call triangulation because they’re supporting each other. So it’s basically a way of gathering qualitative information, kind of making it quantitative because you’re then able to count the number of each code or each theme, but then you look at the two and compare them and say, “Yes, this actually supports what we were saying in the quantitative data. And so, for that reason, we believe there’s a strong level of support to this.” So it’s a mixed methods study, but the heart of this study was really conversation, student interaction, “do you feel supported by each other?” And as much as we can gather information on that quantitatively, I felt quite strongly that we also needed the qualitative aspects and the individual student and faculty feedback to see that that was actually supported, and it was.
Rebecca: At the top, you talked a little bit about what your goals were and what you were trying to achieve. You talk about belongingness and connection, but like, what kinds of words are they using to describe why they liked the platform or why they liked this kind of interaction?
Greg: So there were a lot of different responses, and this is why I landed on that theory of a social-emotional-background fabric is because the levels were so broad, but also broadly supported. So I can tell you one response that I got from students was, “Well, it was nice to know that I needed to privately message my professor, I could just pull out my phone and do it.” And I said, “Well, did you?” “No, but it was nice to know that I could.” [LAUGHTER] Well, to me, that’s an interesting form of support. And I said to them, “Well, did you email at any point?” And they said, “Nah, email is too formal.” But I said “You didn’t even use it, but it felt supportive?” And they said, “Yeah, they’re right there. They’re on my phone.” So it’s even interesting that you didn’t necessarily need to utilize every opportunity, but just them knowing that they could went a long way. Then there was also students who said I get anxiety when there’s 17 or 20 posts and threads and I have to read them and decide who to respond to and they’re honest and like “I don’t read them all I just find one with only one response or none and try and make them feel good.” So students felt supported because there was reduced anxiety and they got to know the people in their group, so it wasn’t a “Who are these people?” After seven weeks, they knew who the people were. So there was that support. There was also, as I mentioned earlier, the support of student to student, where I even had responses where it’s two a.m. and a student sends a text out through the application saying, “I can’t find such-and-such assignment.” And another student who was up at that hour responded, and they can use the at sign too. So they said “At so-and-so: it’s over here. It’s titled this,” and then the student responded “At so-and-so: Thank you so much. I just found it. I really appreciate that.” And then the other student responded, “I got you. I’m up at this hour too. If you need anything.” Stuff like that. So it was really interesting that they also then support each other, and they know that we all have the same questions and the same thing. So that’s why it kind of landed on this idea of a fabric because I’m not sure there’s any one thing. I think it’s just a broad, can I access the faculty member if I need to? Can I talk to other students if I need to? Am I alone out here in a class where we never meet and I’ll never see anyone’s face? Is anyone on my side? And it’s like, “yeah, the people over here in your little group, they’re on your side.” So as to like a specific, “What is it?” I don’t know [LAUGHTER]. I think that area is ripe for further research, but what I have kind of likened it to is if you get good honey, is it the bees, the flowers, the hive? Who knows? I got good honey [LAUGHTER]. I don’t know if it was coming from just the small groups or just the use of the application. Or just the fact that they could DM each other and me if they needed to, and it’s incredibly hard to parse that out because how do you know unless you ask each student individually: “What was the one thing that you found most supportive?” Which we did in interviews, but even when we did that, students can’t put their finger on it. There’s this, “Well, you know, I like this, but I also really like this, and I can do this.” It was everything from: “I like that it dings because then I know to jump in” to “I can do this while I’m in line at the grocery store with my kids and still get my discussion board points” to “I didn’t have to go log in through the log into the institution, then the login to the LMS, then the click on the thread.” It cuts the time, so they like that. So further research is definitely needed [LAUGHTER]. But there’s something…
Rebecca: But they like it? [LAUGHTER]
Greg: Yes, they like it. There’s something to it, and that to me was the big success here was that it worked. It’s at least a proof of concept for now. I think a lot could be done with it, and I also think you could drill down into different things in different places. So one of the things I wanted to try and figure out was how well are students understanding actual concepts and material. But it’s really hard to do that because how do you know what they knew coming in? So I said to an A and P, anatomy and physiology professor, you know, “Maybe we could use an A and P class and see how well students learn the vocabulary in control versus intervention group because that way you’d be able to say are they actually learning specific terms and understanding specific individual content.” That’s really tough to do in a writing class because we don’t have a ton of terminology and it’s very conceptual, so it’s hard to be like, “Did you understand formatting and thesis statements better because we were chatting?” It’s just very, very difficult to gauge something that specific in an English class, especially English 101. But I think there’s other opportunity in the future to do studies in different departments or classes where you could drill down into some of those questions a little bit more in depth, but again, this was proof of concept and to get the dissertation done. But it was a really fun project.
John: Rebecca and I keep hoping to have a podcast where the concept of AI doesn’t come up, but it already did sneak in a little bit because NVivo does use AI in analyzing the transcripts, which can save a tremendous amount of time. But one of the things I was thinking about also is, when I last taught an online class, it was about a year and a half ago, I think, now. One of the things that was happening is I was getting discussion posts very much like you described, that looked very much like most of them were AI- generated, even including sources and other things. And a lot of faculty are reporting that discussion boards seem to be mostly done by AI in many classes. And I’m wondering if perhaps the more informal nature of this might reduce the incentive to do that. Students are not very likely to use AI when texting each other, but when they’re sitting at a computer responding to something that feels higher stakes, it seems to be creeping into more and more of the work that we’re seeing. Maybe this might be one way of getting more productive discussion boards by avoiding AI intervention?
Greg: Oh yeah, and I think to add to that, the kind of response that you do in a text… it’s almost faster just to reply than it is to go “ChatGPT give me a one-sentence response to this,” and fire it off. So I think that it drives engagement that way, but this is also why I said I think it could even be implemented in face-to-face classes, is that if you know the students are having the discussion in class and then are following up with each other through small groups and text messages this way, it’s also incentivizing to have that natural regular communication and don’t rely on technology to give you the answer. And so we have students in these classes. We said, “All you need to do is give us an idea for what your next essay is going to be about.” So, then we’re throwing out, “Well, I’m kind of between this and this, and I’m not really sure.” But you can tell, like that’s not coming from AI. And then you see a thesis statement, and they’re all responding to each other’s thesis statements: “Yeah, I think you can say this or say that.” And I hate to be so potentially dreary, but it means even if they are using AI to get that thesis statement, they’re still interacting with students and getting feedback and making adjustments. So they’re still thinking about it, which is better than “I’m just going to generate it through AI and post it to the discussion board and leave it there.” So forced interaction of some sort, I guess. But yeah, definitely, it is a very strong potential to be… I was never quite sure how to phrase this, and I think the best way to say is: it helps avoid reliance on AI. I don’t think we’re going to be able to completely get it out of the classroom ever, but this is something where there’s less reliance, and they are building confidence as they’re talking to each other about the course material in the chat anyway. So they’re interacting with the material no matter what.
Rebecca: It does seem like the format because it’s informal, it’s low stakes, it probably feels for students like it doesn’t have to be performative. We’re often in settings where we feel like we need to be performing, and so we’re concerned about how we’re constructing a sentence. But the nature of texting is so informal that there isn’t like a performance attached to it, and that might just take away a lot of the stress and it feels more intimate and private and what have you.
Greg: And I’m going to get myself in trouble here. But I will also say there’s only one thing that was maybe a little performative on my end when I do this because I’ve done this in my own classes a few times in preparation for the study, and I’m doing it now in a class that I’m teaching. There’s one thing that’s maybe a little performative on my part, and it’s because it’s very difficult to not correct my text messages. [LAUGHTER] But when I make a typo, I don’t fix it, and I have to say, “Greg, stop it, help yourself. It’s fine. Just go ahead and send.” But it then encourages the students to be like, “Oh, well, Professor Campbell had a typo. It’s fine if I have a typo,” and I just say to them like, “This is not being graded for grammar or usage or anything like that.” Nor would an in-class discussion be. I’m not sitting up there saying, you know, “You said who instead of whom, dock five points.” We would never do that in an in-class discussion, so don’t carry that into the virtual discussion. So that’s the only thing that can maybe be a little performative is I pull myself back and say, “Keep it natural. If you made an error, just leave the error in there. Let them see that it really doesn’t matter. You make mistakes too, and none of this is graded for that.” It’s another way of just trying to be a little more supportive and natural with it, but yeah, sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I really want to go back and change that.” [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: But the rules are no editing.
Greg: No editing. Yeah, that is the rule. [LAUGHTER] And it is perfectly fair. I’ll hold myself to the same standard as them, and I had no problem on that.
John: As long as they don’t incorrectly use the subjunctive mood. [LAUGHTER] But we always end with the question: What’s next?
Greg: Excellent question. So I think what’s next for me is I gathered so much, I mean, as you heard, like I had mountains and mountains of data to sift through. So I think I want to continue looking at some other potential outcomes, and then as I’ve mentioned, future attempts at how to incorporate this into classes. So I can tell you a few things that are kind of in the works. So I’ve got this going with a class of mine right now, but it’s English 205: World Literature I. So the students are already at least a semester into college, and it’s easier to get them into it, and they kind of control the chat much more themselves, so I want to continue doing what I’m doing with my own work. But I really want to try this with three different things. One is another department, even math, and I’m saying that because I’ve weighed in here on the humanities, but this would be useful in STEM classes, and if a student can just reach out to a math instructor, and I say math because that’s the other gateway class, obviously at the institution. So I’d like to pair with someone over there and maybe see what we could do there. Secondly, I think it’s really important to see how this functions with a face-to-face class. Does this support the students or not? And at my institution, we actually created the national standard model for accelerated English, The Accelerated Learning Program, where we have a class of 10 students who are developmental education students, 10 who are regular college students, all together as a class of 20 in English 101. And after that class ends, the 10 college ready students leave, the other 10 students go and get some individual coaching with the faculty member and maybe do some further assistance in helping the students. And I talked to a faculty member; she’s actually the coordinator of the program, and she said she wanted to give it a shot. So we’re going to try this. And she said, “Well, I just think I’ll give it to the 10 developmental education students.” And I said, “I think as soon as word gets out, that these students can text you and are in a group texting each other, you’re gonna have trouble with the other 10.” So she agreed, and so we actually have, it’s a hybrid class, so the students will meet for the first three weeks in person. They’ll get to know each other a little bit there. Then we’ll have four groups of five. So two groups of five for the dev-ed students, two groups of five for the regular students, and we’re going to see if this also helps support students who are considered more of our at-risk population. So will they feel a stronger sense of belonging and connectedness to each other, the faculty member, and the institution, if we implement this into that course? And so that class starts in a week, I think. So, I’ll have results on that at some point. But I think there’s a lot of further research that can be done on this kind of stuff. And then my other thing is just to continue looking at how do we improve engagement, particularly student engagement in asynchronous online classes? Because I think we’re going to continue to see a lot of growth in those. I mean, that modality is the fastest-growing modality we have, and we want to make sure that students are actually learning in my English department. [LAUGHTER] That’s pretty important to me. So, continuing to look at how we can support students in student engagement through new and different means that are maybe a little creative, but also not necessarily an earth-shattering idea. What are other little things like this that we can continue to do to support students and support student engagement?
John: Well, thank you. This is a great project, and we really appreciate you sharing this with us and our listeners.
Greg: Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure.
Rebecca: And we definitely look forward to hearing what happens next in some of these other studies that you’re doing.
Greg: I will follow up with you guys as soon as I have any feedback, maybe at some point in January or February I’ll have results from the study we’re going to do for the dev-ed.
Rebecca: Great.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.
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