Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Matt Bury -
Number of replies: 6
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Hi,

I'm working on social-constructivist and student-led curriculum design principles and would like some feedback from the Moodle.org community smile

It's possible to create courses where all participants have full editing and review privileges, e.g. create a new role or make everyone an editing teacher. Such participants would be able to moderate forums, split discussions, see everyone's grades, assignments, activity logs, etc. In other words, everyone would be fully informed of each others' online activities within that course.

Of course, creating a custom role enables us to fine-tune exactly what participants can and can't do. There's also the issue of participants being sufficiently competent at using all the teacher privileges and not accidentally deleting resources and discussions, unenrolling each other, etc.

In terms of enabling socially-oriented learning activities, student autonomy/responsibility, and "learning communities," what are the pros and cons of doing this?

Thanks in advance smile

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Andy Chaplin -

Hi Matt

I could imagine this would be brilliant if you had the right participants.  But that is a massive "if."

The biggest stumbling block for me would not be the competence of the participants (though that would be a significant constraint).  The biggest issue would be one of the responsibility which comes with such freedom.  I have seen this happen with wikis where the belief of one participant that something should be edited has lead to a meltdown in the cooperation between the learners.  In a very small focus group this is a real problem; in a course with large numbers of participants it's a catastrophe.

In an area where there is no definitive answer and no real concensus I'd see a real danger of the project degenerating into a personality-lead mud fight.

(Unless, of course, you could find that perfect group!)

Just my thoughts,


Andy

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In reply to Andy Chaplin

Re: Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Matt Bury -
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Thanks Andy! smile

Yes, it would appear that the context, students, teacher, classroom culture, etc. would be a core consideration.

My experience has been mostly at the other end of the spectrum with students being "pathologically polite" and never editing their peers' contributions. I've found that asking them to provide constructive feedback and recommendations to the author so that s/he can make the changes, i.e. peer-review, seems to work better.

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Andy Chaplin -

I've experienced the "polite" tactic too but that has often occurred at a lower level where students are not confident of their own abilities.  I find that completely understandable.  It's one of the reasons that I prefer forums for students where they can give an opinion, over the wiki where they are making more of a statement.  Your project would be in effect turning the whole thing into a wiki.

I could imagine you might have more success if it was the final project of a series of courses where all of the elements are introduced step by step.  It would be a much longer process but it might increase the chances of success (and you would produce a lot of useful guidelines and material along the way).

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In reply to Andy Chaplin

Re: Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Mary Cooch -
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I can only agree with Andy but I just wanted to come and say I'm reading this with interest and would love to know how you get on. The comments about 'polite' reminded me of an unfortunate incident when I was teaching. I had a class of 14 year olds who were very boisterous and noisy, but certainly no issues with them contributing in class. I had an observation by the deputy head so I decided to make the most of their personalities by setting up a really interactive lesson where they had to do lots of answering questions and participating. Enter the deputy head to observe them - total panic: quietest they've ever been, and all my prompts to action were met with silence -nobody dared respond sad

They relaxed a little after ten minutes or so but it wasn't the experience I was hoping for.

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In reply to Andy Chaplin

Re: Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Matt Bury -
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Yes, good point about different levels of competence and confidence in the given subject matter smile

Perhaps classifying students/classes according to something like the Dreyfus & Dreyfus  (1980) model of different levels of expertise, from novice to expert, would be helpful in some cases. Although that model is aimed at learning technical, practical, directly observable skills, it's been successfully adapted and applied to cognitive skills too, e.g. Patricia Benner's work on nursing practitioners (2004).

And I guess another significant factor is the personalities and expectations of particular cohorts/groups of students. It may take some preparation to cultivate a climate and set expectations that are more appropriate to the desired levels of collaboration and responsibility.

What do you think?

References

Benner, P. (2004). Using the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition to Describe and Interpret Skill Acquisition and Clinical Judgment in Nursing Practice and Education. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 188–199. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467604265061

Dreyfus, S. E., & Dreyfus, H. L. (1980, February). A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA084551&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

P.S. Only adding references so that anyone who wants to look into it further can do so easily. Don't want academic stuff like this to get in the way of open, frank, and spontaneous discussion smile

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: Pros and cons of giving all course participants full teacher privileges

by Matt Bury -
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Thanks Mary smile

As you already know, Moodle allows us to create and edit roles and assign capabilities in fine-grained detail.

So perhaps the question(s) should be:

  • Which capabilities (and responsibilities) should we delegate to students?
  • Under what conditions/circumstances should we do this (learners, context, duration of courses*, types of learning objectives, etc.)?
  • And what affordances do we intend to provide to students?

I think there are capabilities as well as editing that could be useful to give to students, e.g. to view course access logs and/or reports to see their classmates' participation and not just what they decide to post in forums and edit in wikis. This is something we already have to a certain degree in face-to-face classes; who comes to class regularly, who's listening, who's distracted/bored, etc. I think knowing how much our peers are participating in a group/social activity is an important aspect of personal commitment, investment, and responsibility to each other. What do you think?

I'm trying to think a bit more broadly with this one.

* I think that short courses, like the US and Canadian "Carnegie unit" (12 - 14 weeks), put severe limitations on just how far social/group learning can develop into something substantially productive. The UK's Open University seems to have it right with their modules being 32 weeks long.

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