Online Course Design Pitfall #5: Ignore the ways students learn from each other.
The Statistical Genetics course will assess students based on weekly homework and a project.
The homework will usually be in the form of code that will be posted in the Discussion section so that other students can observe alternative ways of performing statistical analyses. While R programming will be a prerequisite, it takes around 3-4 years of coding in R (assuming no prior coding experience) to really feel comfortable with it. Assuming most students who take the class are either 2nd year Master’s students or 1st-3rd year PhD students, I believe the students will naturally be inclined to see if other students have found an easier way of performing a method in R.
I plan on providing feedback (actual grades will be private) to each student’s homework via comments and questions, and I hope this will encourage students to ask questions, if they have any, on homework postings other than their own. I do not plan to give credit to students for discussion participation as I want the discussion to be organic and giving credit for participating in discussions might lead to low effort posts or questions that students do not actually need answered. Is this an incorrect assumption? In the beginning of each class, other than the first, I will go over the most common mistakes I observed in the homework assignments (I’m not going to call specific students out). This would be a good time for students who might have reflected on other students’ postings to ask in-person questions, so I will provide an opportunity for this.
The project will be a multi-week effort where students will find a data set through their own effort or choose one of several provided and apply the methods taught in class on the project. I could make students post weekly updates on their projects. This would benefit the students themselves by forcing them not to complete the project at the last minute. It would also benefit other students by not having to read through all ten or more projects after the class ends, but rather allowing them to read the projects throughout the course, which can possibly lead to collaborations. However, I don’t want students to feel locked into a project on the first week, which posting online would do as they are unlikely to ask me to switch projects as they would think it would reflect poorly on them. Giving students two weeks of working on the project before posting about it seems like a fair compromise.
