Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Day 8: lack of oomph!

I can really relate to my students tonight, the ones who are taking classes on top of working full-time. It's Tuesday evening, and I really should do some work for History of Science tonight, but I am lacking in oomph to do that.

I think Week 2 has started, but I did not receive an email about that, so I am not 100% sure.

Much more serious problem: no notifications of any kind regarding discussion board participation. Man, that is SO frustrating! I posted a lot of comments and replies once the system finally allowed me to do that... but I have no way of knowing if anyone has posted a reply to one of my comments so that I could participate in an actual back-and-forth dialogue.

There is a "recent activity" stream... but it does not show activity that is specifically of interest to me. I can filter the stream to "my contacts," but that is still not the same as knowing about replies to my comments or replies to the discussion board item I posted in the Week 1 Online Resource area.

Moreover, I am really not confident about the "recent activity" stream since when I check my own recent activity, it is completely inaccurate, showing almost none of my recent activity at all. So, when I go to the profile pages of other people and click recent activity, am I really seeing their recent activity? Since my listing is not complete, I doubt that theirs is either.

Update: Okay, I did my starting assumptions (it was fun to do: Darmok!), and I also commented on some other people's starting assumptions, and then I also commented on two of the online resource assignments that people had shared for Week 1; nobody had done any commenting there. It doesn't look like a lot of participation in the not-for-credit part of the class (will it pick up...? or it is going to dwindle even more...?), and I fear that the lack of notifications will really have a negative impact on people's participation.

No comments:

Post a Comment