Rethinking Student Engagement Activities in Online Chat Spaces

As college instructors, we always encourage students to ask questions in class or during office hours. But many students with questions do not ask them in class for fear appearing stupid in front of others. They also may not have the time to come to office hours.

Online discussion boards can potentially solve this problem. But these are almost universally pre-populated with questions from the instructor, not the students, typically of the “post once, reply twice” variety. Rather than an instructor-driven approach, we wanted a student-driven solution.

Thus, in 2019 we started a small project to see whether we could improve student engagement outside the classroom using an online chat forum embedded in our learning management system. We chose the Piazza chat space instead of the default discussion forum of our LMS because Piazza provided more tools. Certain feedback can be sped up by using Piazza’s endorse function rather than writing comments. Piazza also provides a statistics report about students’ participation and interactions in the chat space.

The key feature was that Piazza allows students to post their responses anonymously. We encouraged all students to do so to allow those who are normally nervous about asking questions to still contribute to the discussion without being identified. To further motivate students’ participation, we designated a portion of the final course grade for completing chat space tasks that we named “star point activities.” We implemented these activities in face-to-face elementary differential equations and precalculus classes as well as an online, asynchronous elementary differential equations class.

We will now discuss how we implemented star points activities. At the beginning of the semester, students have zero points. The instructor sets goals for how many star points students should earn by certain times in the course schedule, usually around exams. Students can earn star points throughout the semester by attempting various participation activities in the online chat space. We allowed them to receive star points for the following:

• Asking quality math questions in the online chat space. We encouraged students to ask their questions related to course material in Piazza. Early in the semester, we explained to students how to ask good questions. For instance, if they have questions related to homework problems, they need to show their attempted work, their thoughts about the problem, or both.
• Productively responding to their peers’ posts. Students were rewarded star points for attempting to answer a classmate’s math question. They could also earn star points for politely pointing out an error in another student’s response. With student posts being anonymous there was no worry of accidentally singling out any particular student.
• Answering concept questions provided by the instructor. The initial goal was to offer students a few concept questions each week. These would come in a variety of flavors. Some were written to foster discussion by allowing students to be inventive with their answers. For instance, precalculus students had to create their own examples for an application of a piecewise function. Other concept questions merely provided some additional practice on key course ideas. As the semester went on, we reduced the number of these questions to keep students from getting overwhelmed.
• Posting a mind map or short summary of the material covered in class that week. We tasked students with creating a weekly summary of course material in the form of a mind map or short note. The only formatting guideline was to limit the summary to one page. It provided especially valuable insight for us to figure out students’ misunderstandings about certain topics before a big assessment. Students were asked to comment on their peers’ summaries and highlight strengths and weaknesses. It was also a valuable opportunity for them to compare responses and learn from each other.
• Writing solutions for posted exam review questions. Near exams, we posted blank exams from previous semesters and exam review questions. Students had to complete the problems and post their solutions, which resulted in them collectively generating their own answer keys. It also gave us one more opportunity to clarify common misconceptions in a low-stakes setting before a big assessment.

We created clear grading criteria to evaluate student contributions to the chat space. The rubric allowed students to use two attempts to make corrections to their submissions. Our intention here was to enable students to learn from their mistakes. We kept the rubric simple so that students could easily understand the criteria and to make it easy on instructors for grading. Students could receive six, four, or two star points for a given activity, with six being a 100 percent on the assignment. A student who scored a four or a two, however, could redo the activity to address instructor feedback. An example of our rubric for grading mind maps and short notes appears in the table below.

At the end of the semester, we sent out a survey to gain insight on students’ perceptions of the activities and the activities’ helpfulness. We found that most students thought the grading criteria were fair. Students reported that the most beneficial star point activities were the weekly mind maps and short notes and the exam review questions. Meanwhile, they regarded reading posts from peers and responding to their posts as being least beneficial. We hoped to generate meaningful discussion among students in Piazza through our star point activities. Unfortunately, there was fairly limited peer-to-peer interaction. Part of this was probably because all responses were anonymous to students, even their own, which made it difficult for them to track where discussion happened. We could always see identifying information with the posts.

An important lesson we learned is to think about the workload students have with other assignments in the class. The precalculus classes had a fairly intense homework regimen in addition to the star point activities. The differential equations class had a lighter homework load. Therefore, there was a significant difference in students’ perceptions of the activities between two courses. We recommend being mindful about student workload levels if you are interested in implementing this strategy in your courses. For our part, we found these activities—especially the weekly summaries—a refreshing teaching experience that allowed us to feel more connected to our students.

Nadun Dissanayake Kulasekera Mudiyanselage, PhD, is an assistant professor of mathematics at Appalachian State University, and Jacob J. Blazejewski, MS, is a PhD candidate in applied mathematics at Michigan Technological University.