Peggy Semingson

Engaging Synchronous Learning in a Literacy-Focused Online Course

Peggy Semingson, PhD

Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction (Literacy Studies), UT Arlington

This project improved upon previous work I have done with synchronous teaching and learning in online courses in literacy teacher education. I have previously done group webinar sessions with undergraduate students, however, the problem has been attendance has been low with students preferring to watch the recording of the webinar rather than attend the live webinar session. I incorporated a three-fold plan to getting my students more actively involved with synchronous learning for a high engagement approach. This included: 1) Implement three required “high engagement” small-group required webinars throughout the class. 2) Foster student awareness and use of synchronous learning as a tool to design lesson plans and 3) Students will participate in a virtual book club to discuss a children’s book for the course using the synchronous tool Blackboard Instant Messenger. Overall, the webinar and the instant messenger experience were very different tools with differing affordances and constraints.

Cindy

I love these ideas! What is Blackboard instant messenger like? I wonder how it differs from Facebook messaging, which is what I used. The students seemed to like that a lot if they were already facebook uses, but it was hard for them if not. The first time was probably the hardest, because we found that we needed to get the students started. In later sessions, leaders would post questions at least to start with, and that really helped, plus the leader could jump in with a question later if needed to get students going again.

I really need to learn more about your webinars - how do you overcome the technical issues that students invariably have?
- Jiyoon Yoon
  
  Thank you, Peggy~ I will use your three fold plan for my synchronous study with my students~ But I am wondering which tool you used for developing the webinar? Was the collaborate good enough?
Kiva Harper

Hi Peggy. Great job. I’ve tried using BB messenger in the past with no student participation. This gave me a few ideas. Thank you.
Karabi

Peggy - Great job. I used BB IM and Collaborate. I found that students primarily prefer the chat box within Collaborate. However, if someone has any question that they would like to ask privately, they would use BB IM to text me while the Collaborate session was on. My take-away from your presentation is to incorporate BB IM in student small group activities as texting seems to be the preferred method of collaborating. I got some great ideas 🙂 Thank you.
J. T. Dellinger

Neat project, Peggy! It’s cool that you get to be a part of the Civitas pilot - I look forward to hearing how that goes! How do you think that the predictive tools will help your class in particular? Regarding this project, how will you differentiate between beginners and more advanced phonics users in your class, and do you plan to examine both separate and then compare?
- Peggy Semingson
  
  I think the predictive tools will help me and the academic coaches to intervene early with students identified as having challenges. We can hopefully also improve retention….
  For this project, I am guessing the preservice teachers are beginners although some of our grad students are also beginners. I think I will more likely differentiate more broadly between preservice teachers in the aggregate with the grad students.
Melanie Mason

So interesting. I want to use text-based analysis going forward with my research. What is your process for identifying key words in your data?
Kim Breuer

I am interested in seeing how you will combine this data with Civitas data. Once we start looking at our data this fall, we will have to compare notes. It would seem to me that we should be able to identify cohorts within a live class and use both sets of data to provide more customizable learning pathways for students in online courses in nearly real time.
- Peggy Semingson
  
  Let’s keep each posted as we work through the Civitas pilot/data!
Maria Trache

I learned something completely new.. sentiment analysis. I looked in the past at attitudes (e.g., attitudes toward science) and classified them as positive or negative based on agreement/disagreement with some statements that were conceptually indicative of some attitude. Not sure how it works in ‘sentiment analysis’ .. is it more like a text analysis in which words perceived as positive/negative/neutral are somehow counted? Interesting
- Peggy Semingson
  
  Interesting parallel/connection, Maria! I believe sentiment analysis is used heavily in the business sector, at the moment!
Regina Urban

I’m so glad you chose this topic, Peggy. Your overview of how you used it to look at thematic and sentiment analysis of your students who were learning to use / apply phonics in the classroom with grade school students was very helpful. Were there any aspects of LIWC that you found challenging as you were learning the program for the sentiment analysis? Are researchers in your field of interest publishing many studies that have used LIWC for the analysis?
- Peggy Semingson
  
  I am still in progress with the project, but I will keep people posted! There are a few studies with LIWC, but hardly any in my field of literacy! I think it came out of a psychology framework…..
Cindy

I so want to learn more about LIWC - I have many ideas about using it!
- Peggy Semingson
  
  I will keep you posted!