Week 2:  Pedagogical applications of MyUCDavis

MyUCDavis is a web portal that is available to everyone at UC Davis.  Relevant links, course web pages, course management information, and so on are collected there, all customized for the individual.  There is a separate page configuration for each type of person:  faculty, student, and staff.  As a student, what you see when you go to MyUCDavis is somewhat different from what your faculty partner sees.

We have already seen how MyUCDavis can be used for email and course administration (downloading class rosters and uploading final grades).  Now we will look in more detail at the options MyUCDavis gives faculty for teaching, including a generalized discussion on the uses of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in teaching.  These MyUCDavis functions are also summarized briefly in the faculty toolbox.

Course home page

Even if a faculty member has done nothing to create a course home page, the basic information about each course is automatically drawn from the banner system to make a simple course home page.  This page is available to all MyUCDavis users, and comes up automatically on the MyUCDavis page for the instructor as well as students enrolled in the course.  Because it is so easily accessible to students, it is to your faculty partner's benefit to make use of it. 

There are two approaches to using the MyUCDavis course home page.  For instructors who have already created web pages for their courses, it can be used as a "front end," holding links to the external home page and selected sub-pages of the course site.  That way, students can access the site directly or through MyUCDavis.  For instructors who have not already designed web materials, the MyUCDavis course page can serve as the single home page for the course. 

Besides accessibility, another advantage to using MyUCDavis for course home pages is that it already contains basic information about the course, such as classroom, meeting times, course number, and Registrar's official course description.  Moreover, integration of the functions listed below with MyUCDavis makes it easy for students to access the correct chat room, etc.  Instructors can easily add a more detailed syllabus, homework assignments, as well as external links.  The advantage to having this information on the web is two-fold.  Students can't lose the material, so there is no excuse for not knowing the policy, assignments, and so on.  Also, in some cases printing costs can be reduced.

Uploaded course materials

Faculty members can easily upload materials at any time to their course web sites.  Uploaded materials may include supplementary reading, worksheets and exercises, lecture notes, pictures, or anything else that the instructor would like to make available for students.  Materials may be protected so that only those students enrolled in the class can see them, or else open to the public.  This is an easy way to secure copyrighted materials that are being made available to students under the "Fair Use" for education clause.  There is currently 55 MB of space available for each instructor.

Class chat

Class chat is one of two special functions that are integrated with MyUCDavis.  Chat is designed for synchronous computer mediated communication (CMC).  That is, students can talk to each other "live" on the internet, just as in any chat room.  The transcript of the entire chat remains available indefinitely, so students can read everything that their classmates have said, even if those classmates have already logged off.  Thus, although the chat function is primarily designed to be used by students who are logged on at the same time, it isn't necessary for every student to be on line the entire time. 

Chat is good for discussions in which students are interacting and responding to each other in a discussion format.  The advantage is that, because it is "live," discussion tends to be lively.  It is highly interactive and brings a sense of immediacy to the interaction.  Studies have shown that, because synchronous CMC partakes of the nature of a conversation rather than a written exchange of letters or even email, the language used tends to be less formal, even telegraphic at times.  Sentences are short, and may even be fragmentary.  There is less time to pay attention to the finer points of spelling and grammar when the focus is on getting the message out as quickly as possible.  Instructors should take this into consideration when they read the transcripts.  Researchers have also found that sometimes students who are too shy to speak up much in class often feel empowered when using CMC, and make substantial contributions to the discussion.

There are many ways of using CMC in a course.  Some of them can be implemented using either the class chat function or news group function, described below.  An instructor could hold virtual office hours via the chat function.  He or she could have students use chat rooms to work out collaborative projects, with each group having its own room within the class chat space.  Instructors could give students assignments to collect information from the web and share it in the chat room (or news group, described below).  Another option is to encourage students to extend discussion outside of class by giving extra credit for every student who posts one question and responds to three of their classmates' questions.  Your partner could post questions, or words to be defined, or mini-topics and ask students to elaborate.  Perhaps he or she might want students to reconstruct part of the material that was introduced in that day's lecture in order to consolidate their comprehension.  In language classes, an instructor could create "jig-saw" type activities in which each student has only part of the information he or she needs to complete the task and therefore must communicate with classmates.  Class chats can be useful for mid-term or final reviews.  The list is only limited by the instructor's creativity. 

When deciding what solution to offer your faculty partner, consider whether some activities he or she is already doing in class might be enhanced, extended, simplified, or even replaced by a technology tool such as CMC.  Is it desirable to extend class discussion outside the classroom?  Would it make sense to replace part of the face-to-face consultation time with on-line chat?  Could some classroom time be made available for other activities by moving some tasks to CMC?  Would it have a good impact on review sessions if students have the opportunity to learn collaboratively by asking each other questions first, and only meet with the instructor later for further clarification?  Would it make sense for students to critique each other's papers electronically first, and only submit the final draft to the instructor for grading?  Technology, especially CMC, offers a chance to shift from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered collaborative learning, while still allowing the instructor the ability to oversee and gently guide where necessary.  In both the chat room and news group, the instructor has the ability at any time to see what students are doing and to participate if he or she wants to.

The drawback of the chat function is that the entire discussion takes place linearly.  Each comment is recorded in the archive chronologically, even if the topic branches out.  Therefore, this tool is best suited for focused discussions on a single topic.  Also, for large classes, the messages may come so fast and furiously that it is hard for students to keep up.  One way to adjust for this is to break students into smaller groups and set up a separate room for each group.

If your faculty partner sets up a class chat through MyUCDavis, students will be able to access it instantly from the MyUCDavis page for your course.  The chat room is also accessible directly through any browser, but in that case, students have to go through the extra step of selecting the course, and then the chat. 

Threaded news groups

If an instructor wants to encourage students to explore several avenues of discussion simultaneously, a threaded news group is a good CMC option.  Unlike chat rooms, news groups are asynchronous.  Students are not expected to be logged on at the same time, so discussion can take place over several days.  Moreover, contributions to the discussion are threaded, that is, arranged by topic.  This way, someone adding to the discussion can choose to read only those messages relevant to one topic prior to posting.

News groups are similar to what used to be called bulletin boards.  Postings to news groups are more similar to email or other written communication than to oral speech.  Researchers have found that sentences, and messages themselves, tend to be longer and more formal in language.  The students are not concerned with responding immediately, so they can take as much time as they wish to think over their responses.  Because there is no requirement to be logged on simultaneously, students who do their studying at odd hours are not inconvenienced by time constraints. 

Having no time constraints may also be viewed as a disadvantage, depending on the purpose of the exercise.  Instructors should allow at least several days for students to post their messages and respond to each other.  If the faculty member is looking for an immediate response, such as a short discussion of that day's reading or lecture, then a chat room, rather than threaded news group, is probably the best tool.  Both tools are forms of CMC, with complementary strengths.  The key is to choose the right tool for the task.

If you set up a news group through MyUCDavis, it will be listed on the MyUCDavis course page.  Students need only click on the word, "News Group" from the main page to access it.  Students can also access the news group without going to MyUCDavis, but in that case they need to determine what program they are going to use to read news groups and they have to subscribe specifically to the course news group.  The latter method is much more cumbersome than using MyUCDavis.

Automated class mailing lists

The class mailing list function has recently been upgraded at UC Davis.  Class mailing lists are ways to send email to all the students enrolled in a course.  Your faculty partner can set the list up so that students themselves can also post to the list.  All enrolled students are automatically added to the list, and can receive a standard welcoming message if desired.  If there are students who prefer to use off-campus email accounts, their email addresses must be added manually to the mailing list.  Instructors should ask the class at the beginning of the term to see if there are students who would like their off-campus email addresses added.  Once the list has been created, a faculty member can make additions and changes using the web interface for managing a class mailing list.

It is easy to create a class mailing list with an automatic message archive, and link the archive to the MyUCDavis course page.  We strongly recommend that faculty partners  use the archive.  That way, students who add the course late can still see all the messages that have been sent to the list.  Moreover, if a student accidentally deletes an important message, he or she can check the archive.

Class mailing lists are good for one-way dissemination of information from the instructor to the students.  If there is a change in schedule or an additional assignment, the class mailing list is an ideal way to notify students.  Email messages or web pages that are of interest to the class can be forwarded to the list.  Class mailings lists can also be used for discussion, although the potentially large volume of email should be considered.  Keep in mind that every message sent to the list arrives in every subscriber's inbox as an email message.

Final thoughts

MyUCDavis is designed for ease of use, but it is still good practice for the instructor to introduce the tools in class at the beginning of the term.  Five to ten minutes is probably enough time to cover what students need to know.  If the instructor is using a laptop with Ethernet connection, then he or she can simply show students in the regular classroom.  Alternatively, a short portion of class time in one of the university's computer labs could be used for training.  A third option is to provide a handout.  If there are any students who have not yet used a computer at all, the instructor could invite them to come to office hours to be shown personally.  As each class of incoming students is more computer-savvy than the last, training is becoming less and less of an issue.  Moreover, once a student has used the MyUCDavis tools for one course, he or she doesn't have to learn them again for other courses. 

Although some of the functions of MyUCDavis are also available without using the portal, the gain in convenience for both students and instructors is invaluable.

Required reading:

Reference links:

Resources on CMC for further reading by your faculty partner:

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page created by Mary Jacob (msjacob@ucdavis.edu), last revised September 30, 2001