Alex Halavais has posted a few followups to his blogging in the large class (roughly 400 students) experiment. He has gathered together quite a bit of student feedback, and describes some of the technical and pedagogical hurdles he encountered while teaching his course on “Cyberporn & Society”.
It sounds like getting students comfortable with the interface was one of the biggest challenges, along with the sheer bulk of reading and evaluating several hundred blogs:
“I’ve just finished going through nearly 300 blogs, and my eyes feel like they are about to fall out of my head. (Thanks go to the inestimable help of Brenda, who took on 100 of these.) I’ll write a bit more about this later. First, I was crazy to ask a 400 person class to blog. If I ever teach another course this large, it’s multiple guess all the way.
Second, about half the students really seem to be getting it, and the posts seem to be measurably improving for these students. About half have completely dropped out of blogging—effectively dropped out of completing the class, it seems. That failure rate is unacceptable, but I’m not sure what to do about it. Part of it is that students are unaccustomed to having something due each week, especially in an online course. Part is that they are not comfortable writing, I fear. But a lot has to do with the strangeness of getting used to blogging.”
He follows those thoughts with the observation that some of the students were encouraged when they saw the traffic statistics now available in wordpress.com blogs, and that people were reading and participating in their blogs.
To collect and display all the blog content in one place, so to speak, he set up an aggregator. It looks like there’s also a del.icio.us tag for the course.
I’ve mentioned this before on my own blog, but thought that a longer followup might be better suited for this arena. I am really looking forward to hearing more as he continues to look back on the semester.