Editing Building Successful Online Communities (Spring 2021) (section)

==== 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.