Creating a Student Initiated Online Course Review
Ever wonder what your online students have retained at the end of the course? I decided to find out in my last online class and the results were gratifying. I gave my students the opportunity to earn extra credit points by responding to this prompt: Describe two things you learned from SOCIOLOGY IN ACTION that you did not know before taking this course and that your classmates have not yet mentioned. I gave them credit if they said something new that was factually accurate and let them post up until the last minute of the course.
As you might imagine, the stronger students tended to take advantage of this chance to earn points before the weaker ones. This ensured that the weaker ones had to read many posts and work harder to come up with something not mentioned previously. The result was they went through a great review of important points from the course and got a chance to think about what they learned and articulate (at least some of) it!
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Kathleen Odell Korgen is professor of sociology at William Paterson University and co-editor of Sociology in Action.
