The SIOP Exchange

Why I Love Teaching Online

By Jennifer Bunk, SIOP Blogger

I was going to write a blog post about MOOCs but I decided against it.  I didn’t want to add to the chatter (as insightful as some of it may be).  Also, there is so much apprehension and negativity surrounding MOOCs (and distance education in general) that I thought it would be nice to focus on the NOW and the POSITVE.

And right now, I am positive I love teaching online.  Here are eleven reasons, in no particular order:

1. I was not forced to do it.

It’s quite unfortunate that some academics are forced to teach online.  If you don’t want to teach online, you shouldn’t have to.  I do it because I want to and that passion rubs off on my students.

Could Monitoring of Emotions in Electronic Communications Be Used to Predict the Well-Being of Organizations?

By Carrie Zapka, SIOP Blogger 

Social Scientists Wade Into the Tweet Stream, an article in the September 30, 2011 issue of Science, is a stimulating read (subscription required. Republished by University of Vermont here). The author shared recent studies that mined Twitter data for insights into human behavior.

Peter Dodds and colleagues from the University of Vermont, for example, applied a novel method to analyze years of tweets from around the world. The Twitter data suggest a global decay in mood, a decrease in “average happiness” level, which they determined by comparing the relative usage of common words associated with positive or negative moods. Their results indicate that the world is not as happy today as it was in 2009!

Discussion Boards: Win-Win for Instructors and Students?

By Jennifer Bunk, SIOP Blogger

Part 3:  Disadvantages

In my last 2 posts here and here, I introduced how discussion boards can be used in the classroom and reviewed some of their advantages.  Now, let’s move on to their disadvantages.

Disadvantage #1:  It’s not REALLY a discussion

Here are some sample responses from a discussion board where I asked students to define “job success” (click for full image):

Discussion Boards: Win-Win for Instructors and Students? Part 2

Part 2: Advantages

By Jennifer Bunk, SIOP Blogger

In my last post, I introduced discussion boards and how you might effectively incorporate them into your classes. In this, post, I will discuss their advantages.

Advantage #1: Students love them (especially the introverts)

When I ask students what they like most about my classes, they almost always mention the discussion boards. Introverted students especially love them because their voices are finally heard. In discussion boards, it’s not the loudest person who wins, it’s the most insightful.

Discussion Boards: Win-Win for Instructors and Students?

Part 1: Introduction

By Jennifer Bunk, SIOP Blogger

I was going to omit the question mark for this post’s title, but I realized that would be too presumptuous. There are lots of advantages to using discussion boards for teaching, but there are disadvantages as well. Because this post ended up being a tad longer than I had expected, I’m going to break it up into three parts. In Part 1, I’ll introduce discussion boards and how to effectively incorporate them into your classes. In Parts 2 and 3, I’ll discuss their advantages and disadvantages, respectively.