193 – Contributed Oral Poster Presentations: Section on Statistical Education

Using Low-Tech Chat to Foster High-Quality Interactions in an Online Statistics Course

at New Mexico State University

Current practice in statistics education emphasizes active learning and collaborative work so that students engage with the material and with each other. These two techniques are important in traditional courses, but are especially vital in online statistics courses that are typically designed for independent, solitary learning. To mitigate this passive approach, online instructors need to build “social presence� in their course by deliberately incorporating student-student activities. These activities, while relatively easy to add to a traditional course where students assemble three times per week, can be challenging to include in an online course where students are physically isolated. To develop this sort of activity, distance instructors can think small and plan smart by adding online chats. Chats are easy to add because they are low-tech, familiar to most students, and part of most course management systems such as Blackboard. When we incorporated regularly scheduled, tightly focused, required chat sessions into an introductory online statistics course, student ratings of the chats were overwhelmingly positive. Specifically, 87 percent of respondents (n = 16) reported that the chats were “rewarding or very rewarding� and 81 percent said that the chats were “helpful or very helpful in learning the material.� Open-ended comments were overwhelmingly positive: “I was really worried about the chats in the beginning…once we started I used them well� and “chats allowed me to ask other students for help and get their input on how to solve a question from their perspective.� Chats also received high marks from instructors for their ease of incorporating in the course and their low-tech simplicity. We found that chats gave students meaningful opportunities for active learning and collaborative problem solving that are difficult to include in typical online statistics courses. They are a regular part of our courses. Specifics on implementing chats, grading rubrics, and management strategies will be discussed.