Editing Building Successful Online Communities (Spring 2021) (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 "[Cases]" in the syllabus and I will expect you to read these particularly closely. It is important to realize that '''I will not summarize case material in class and I will not cover it in lecture'''. 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 not right and 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 in each class.

Because I understand that cold calling can be terrifying for some students, I will be circulating a list of questions we will discuss alongside the weekly announcements (i.e., at least 6 days in advance). I will only cold call to ask students for which you have time to prepare your answers. Although it is a very good idea to write out answers to these questions in advance, I will not be collecting these answers. You are welcome to work with other students in the class to brainstorm possible answers. Although I will definitely ask questions that I do not distribute ahead of time, I will never cold call when asking these questions.

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 over the course the quarter. Although there is there ''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.