Instructional Blogging On Campus: Identifying Best Practices

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Instructional Blogging On Campus: Identifying Best Practices

6/14/2005

By Stuart Glogoff Sr
Consultant, Learning Technologies
University of Arizona

The University of Arizona’s Learning Technologies Center (LTC) provides centralized support for instructional blogging and hosts blogs for administrative units exploring new ways to provide information to students. In the instructional arena, faculty are integrating blogs into both online and blended learning environments. University administrative units are introducing blogging as a new communications and marketing tool in an effort to reach undergraduate and graduate students in more interactive ways. What, then, are successful academic blogging techniques?

Experiences collected during spring semester 2005 demonstrate this learning tool’s versatility. Instructional blogging was used in a wide range of courses including: Freshman Composition, graduate seminars in English and Philosophy, an upper level Spanish conversation course, art appreciation, and MIS. The applications are as varied as the disciplines adopting blogging. Faculty have introduced blogging to: promote peer review, foster student-to-student, student-to-faculty, and faculty-to-student interaction; discuss course readings; promote discussion and public comment; address class concerns; extend learning beyond the classroom; and develop writing skills because it encourages students to reflect on what they compose.

Several instructors have demonstrated successful instructional blogging practices. A professor who used instructional blogging in two different undergraduate courses recommends blogging as a way to extend learning beyond classroom meetings. From his experience with discussion forums, he believes that 90 percent of his students read forum posts but only 10 percent contribute to discussions in a meaningful way. He replaced forums with blogs and discovered that more students participated and that the quality of their contributions improved markedly. He attributes this to students taking an increased ownership of their ideas and that with their own blogs, students can not lurk as they can on forums. In terms of instructional applications, this professor prefers to use classroom time to address more complex concepts and found that blogs afford his students the opportunity to master the simpler concepts outside the classroom. By addressing a student’s needs through the blog before class meeting, blogging supported a “just-in-time” instructional model.

A second example comes from the UA College of Nursing where a large part of its graduate program’s traditional classroom instruction has been replaced with fully online courses. Faculty are addressing how best to make the transition from the physical classroom to one that is fully online and overcome the absence of face-to-face experiences. Students in this discipline are studying to become nurse practitioners and must make the transition from following a physician’s instructions to making decisions and being able to explain why a particular choice is made. The blog replaces classroom presentations and is now the central place where students describe their first experiences as nurse practitioners.