Editing Building Successful Online Communities (Fall 2024) (section)

=== Case discussion ===

The course relies heavily on the case study method which describes a particular form of instructor-mediated discussion. A standard "case" usually involves reading an example—perhaps up to 20-35 pages of background about an organization or group facing an ambiguous or difficult challenge. I will mark certain readings as "[Case]" in the syllabus, and I expect you to read them particularly closely. It is important to realize that '''I will not summarize case material in class, and I will not cover it in the lectures'''. I expect you all to have read it, and we will jump in and start discussing it.

Cases ask students to put themselves in the positions of individuals facing difficult situations to tease out the tensions and forces at play in the case and to construct — through group discussion — the broader lessons and takeaways. Cases are a wonderful way to connect the sometimes abstract concepts taught in many academic courses to real examples of the type of ambiguous situations that you will likely encounter in your career. Generally speaking, there are no right or wrong answers in cases.

==== Cold Calling ====

Cases rely roughly on the [[:wikipedia:Socratic method|socratic method]] where instructors teaching cases cold call on students—i.e., instructors call on people ''without'' asking for volunteers first. I will be doing this for the majority of our class sessions.

Because I understand that cold calling can be terrifying for some students, I will be circulating a list of questions (labeled "Reading Note" in the syllabus) that describe the kinds of questions I am likely to ask each week along with the weekly announcements (i.e., at least 6 days in advance). Although it is a very good idea to take notes guided by these questions or to write out answers to these questions in advance, we will not be collecting these answers. You are welcome to work with other students to brainstorm possible answers. Although I will also ask questions I do not distribute ahead of time, these questions will give you a good sense of where to focus your reading and note-taking.

I have written a computer program that will generate a random list of students each day, and I will use this list to '''randomly''' cold call students in the class. To try to maintain participation balance, the program will try to ensure that everybody is cold called a similar number of times during the quarter. Although there is ''always'' some chance that you will called upon next, you will become less likely to be called upon relative to your classmates each time you are called upon.

==== Assessment for case study discussion ====

I have placed detailed information on case study-based discussion on [[User:Benjamin Mako Hill/Assessment#Case Discussion|the case discussion section of my assessment page]]. This describes both the rubrics I will use to assess your case discussion and how I will compute the final grades in the course.