Blogs activate students and provide better feedback
“Find an image illustrating a specific period in the history of design and upload it to Blackboard.” This was just one of the many assignments which associate professor Andreas Thorngreen recently gave BA students at International Communication and Multimedia — assignments that led to students being more active and, thus, lectures more effective.
Article originally published in Cultivate magazine ed. 05, June 2014
by Line Hassall Thomsen
Andreas Thorngreen from AU Herning has attended the Go Online course on blended learning of Centre for Teaching and Learning. During the course, associate professors and professors at Aarhus BSS learn to include online activities and elements in their teaching.
“With the new methods, the students work more and contribute to the teaching. This dialogue is very positive and creates a better dynamic, making it possible for me to change and adapt the lessons during the course.” — Andreas Thorngreen
The course inspired Thorngreen to change his two BA-courses Media Production I and III: a special method of group work is combined with the students’ uploading assignments to blogs on the e-learning platform Blackboard.
The starting point was the so-called jigsaw-method in which students first collaborate in groups on a specific topic. After this, they are put in new groups different to the original ones. Thus students report to their new group members what they learnt in their first group.
Many teaching benefits
Andreas Thorngreen chose to add an extra step to the jigsaw-method in that he required of the students to upload results from the first group work on a Blackboard blog.
That way, a simple instruction such as ’find an image illustrating a specific period in the history of design’ developed into a collection of cases consisting not only of images but also of texts explaining design period characteristics in the specific image.
From the point of view of learning, this method has at least three advantages:
- Firstly, the assignment made the students open their textbooks. “At a time, where many students are not reading much, this type of assignment motivates students to open the books in order to solve the question. The assignment activates them because they have to information and use the theory to explain what they have found,” Andreas Thorngreen states.
- Secondly, the assignment engaged many different students. Andreas Thorngreen told each group that they were free to upload as many examples as they wanted. The Blackboard statistics indicated that a lot of students contributed to the assignment — some even adding many different illustrations.
- A final but important benefit was that the student uploads were useful after the individual lecture.
As Andreas Thorngreen points out: “Of course the advantage of working online is that the blog with student uploads stays online. This means that the material can be referenced and used in the future — and also for the exam and after they have graduated.”
Feedback open for all
Andreas Thorngreen also used Blackboard as a tool for facilitating feedback.
During the course, he gave an assignment asking students to design a logo. The logo and a short text explaining the logo was uploaded to Blackboard.
“The fact that the logo was visible for all online, meant that I could give feedback which could be seen by all students. In that way, all students could learn from the feedback for others, on top of the one for their own work,” Andreas Thorngreen explains.
The shared feedback methods also made it visible for all that there were some general misunderstandings among students, which in turn led Thorngreen to make a new assignment which he followed up thoroughly.
“The exam results proved that students had a solid focus on design principles in practice, and used the feedback on their logos,” he says.
More students activated than usual
Andreas Thorngreen clearly experienced that online tools helped activating and engaging more students than usual.
“With the new methods, the students work more and contribute to the teaching. This dialogue is very positive and creates a better dynamic, making it possible for me to change and adapt the lessons during the course.”
He also points out that follow up discussions of the course contributed to students gaining a greater overview and helped students take ownership of the content to an extent rarely seen in lectures.
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Centre for Teaching and Learning is an educational research and development unit at Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, Denmark.
