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I like Marcy's idea of an on-line class discussion list, but wonder
if it ends up dominated by just a few people (like most of these
lists) or whether everyone does/has to contribute?

I too had students do journal type responses in a large class (they
were 70 in the end).  I loved reading them and responded only very
briefly on the individual entries but made notes and reported back to
the class a whole.

Re. evaluation, students had to collect all their responses,
exercises - some done in class in groups, others as homework - (which
the students corrected themselves while I went over the answers using
overheads), and similar stuff in a logbook which was collected at
midterm and at the end of term and evaluated only as a participation
mark (the stuff was or was not done).  One has to keep one's sanity
somehow.

For their project, students did oral presentations in groups of three:
one presenting, the other two completing an evaluation sheet whose
comments were shown to the presenter and then submitted to me (again
for a participation mark, although some of the students wanted to
award specific marks to their peers!).  I walked around the class
listening in.  At first, my students were highly dubious about this
approach, but could see that presenting to a class of 70 would not be
feasible (one girl claimed she'd rather have me lecture!). I modelled
the procedure beforehand and, to everyone's amazement (including my
own), things went really well.  The students were very serious,
arriving with note cards, visual aids, etc. had a good time and
learned from each other.

The peer editing exercise that was part of the project was a bit more
uneven, some students rushing through and others taking much more
time and thought.  But I can rethink how I should set that up next
time.  The result of this three-step approach (final submission
of project being step #3) was that everyone handed in their project
on time!  No requests for extensions.

Nevertheless, some students felt that I should have done all the
marking of everything myself.  Some were also very unsure how they
could possibly help someone else in the editing process (most were
francophones), but discovered that yes, they could learn from each
other even here.

I sometimes wonder if the students are not more traditional than the
teachers (like Russ's young woman).  Anyway, I look forward to getting
some more postings on this subject; so far I've seen some very
interesting suggestions.

Mieke

Mieke Koppen Tucker
Bishop's University