Assessment of Ning Class

[Mary Hricko]

Well, the assessment is out...ning has proven to be a successful classroom environment for my online students.

Last semester, I taught my online course in ning rather than using the university cms tool and met great success. Despite the semester being over, my students have requested that we keep the class site up so they can continue not as classmates, but as a social networking cohort group interested in edtech. How many times does that happen?

During the semester, I measured the amount of interaction between student-student, student-content, and student-teacher...I was pleased to see that in this environment the student-student interaction was very high--I then went further to examine the type of interaction (social, academic-helpdesk-non class work) I was pleased to see that the levels of interaction in which students engaged in academic related dialogue discussions with one another on their comment walls had been rather high...-it might have been to further discuss their opinion on a class discussion or reading, but it was interesting to see that the comment wall had become the place where academic classroom chat was taking place---students would use their comment walls to clarify notes and other comments about the lesson. the comment walls became the hallway of the online course

I plan to extend the review of this aspect in my classes this semester. If you are teaching in ning, please take note of this activity and let me know if you are seeing the same.

I had the students do a midterm assessment of the course and the features of the environment and they all prefer the collaboration in ning to other systems. I found this interesting since in trad cms tools one can facilitiate discussion rather easily, but my students felt that ning did it better. I suppose that ning offers more opportunities to give voice to the class discussions. students felt that there were many more places to express themselves and to generate content...that's important, at least to me.

Students did express complaint about me having them go to two separate web spaces. I had them building portfolios in a wiki...Dear ning staff, please give us a wiki so I can set up individual student portfolios or give me a way that students can build their own portfolio on their ning space. Is there EVER going to be a wiki feature in ning?

Can we build ning in such a way, there are features to the members pages in the customization of the layout...or perhaps class feature templates for people using ning for teaching? I am just thinking outloud, folks.

Students seemed to prefer this environment because of the one cick element. Everything they needed was there in one click. I suppose one can emulate that in a cms...but many educators might not something to think about when course designing in a cms.

As I put together all of the assessment notes (include self-assessments, student assessments) for the classes this year, I plan to work on a report of this ongoing project.

Ning class 2 begins next week...I can hardly wait.

[Eileen Field]

Mary that is fascinating. I am a head teacher of an online school in the UK and we are exploring the use of Ning as a social networking site but I as so many of my students would be classed as vulnerable - I have concerns as to the amount of "moderation" and "filtering" that is needed! I would hate if any of my students decided to exercise their quality "anglo saxon" expletives towards any other student! Sad but true for some of my students. Do you think Ning would be good enough for this or should I use something like Moodle? Ideally I'm looking for something more social than academic.