Course discussions are an essential part of the learning experience. In distance education, these conversations may happen primarily or exclusively in the forums. This makes forum reading an important part of your coursework. 

• Read forums at least every other day, if not daily. If you read forums frequently, they stay manageable (and you’ll have an ongoing feeling of being “connected” to your classmates).
• Figure out if there is a pattern to posts. In my classes, there’s usually a pattern of when people post the most (often near the end of the weekend, when they’ve been reading course materials and are ready to discuss them). This can let you know what to expect in terms of reading load on a given night, and can also be a great time for you to post and get a response.
• Prioritize forums like “news and announcements” where you would expect to see posts from the instructor. These are essential reading and instructors will assume you’ve seen them.
• Subscribe to important forums, such as “news and announcements” or one for your project team, to be sure you see any new messages.
• Look for ways to manage your reading, such as options to mark posts as read, flag important posts, etc.  

As the semester starts, I thought I’d offer some practical advice on locating a website when the link you have doesn’t work. Many faculty ask students to read articles or other items from websites. Although we may provide a working link on the syllabus, URLs do change and the link you have may not work by the time you need to read the material. So, what to do? Before you contact the faculty member for an updated link, try the following:

• Search the sponsoring organization’s website by the title of the document (e.g., if you need to read ALA’s “Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education,” you can go to the ALA website and search for the document).
• Use the link to work back to the sponsoring organization or author (e.g., Christine Bruce’s “Seven Faces of Information Literacy in Higher Education” was at http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~bruce/inflit/faces/faces1.htm; if I cut the URL back to her personal page at http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~bruce I see a link to the document, which is now at http://sky.fit.qut.edu.au/~bruce/il/faces.jsp).
• Search Google by the title of the document. Google may provide you an updated link. In addition, Google “caches” images of websites, so if a document has actually been removed from the web, you may be able to see an archived image.

Broken links in a syllabus can be frustrating, but are often beyond the instructor’s control. Use this as an opportunity to practice your web searching skills – after all, one day you want to get paid to do this at a reference desk, right?

Both Angel (used at SJSU SLIS) and Moodle (used at UIUC LEEP) have a feature where you can subscribe to forums so that all posts are automatically emailed to you. Both systems allow you to customize your subscriptions – you can subscribe to all forums (in which case you may want to set-up your email to automatically move posts to a specific course folder for the sake of manageability) or only selected forums (such as an “Announcements” forum, making this a great way to ensure you see important announcements in a timely way).

This summer I have a lot of new students in my reference course, which has me thinking about tips for being successful in an online course. Rather than write a huge post of advice, I’ll work on multiple posts devoted to specific aspects of distance education. Today I happen to be thinking about managing the reading load, so I’ll start there.

• Buy the books. You’re already investing a lot in tuition dollars; it is vital you spend a little more money and get the required texts (if you really need to save money, try to borrow them from the library or via ILL). Remember that in graduate school, the professor may assume you’ve read the material, but won’t cover it explicitly in class. If you haven’t read the text, you’ve missed important content.
• Print the articles ahead of time. If you print the articles in batches, you’ll always have reading available when you need it. In addition, if there are any problems with accessing articles, you’ll have enough time to contact the instructor or the library.
• Get organized. Keeping your readings binder-clipped by class and week can also be helpful – rather than looking through a stack of printouts for needed articles, you can easily grab “this week’s” stack on your way to an appointment or the library. When you are done reading, moving articles to file folders or a three-ring binder arranged by week keeps them organized for later reference.
• Know what to expect. Skim the readings, check the page counts, etc. Some readings can be very easy, while some can be very dense. Don’t get caught by surprise and run out of time to finish all the readings before class.
• Print the syllabus or schedule of readings and check off readings as you complete them. This keeps you organized and gives you a tangible marker of accomplishment, both of which can be important, since distance education requires a great deal of self discipline.
• Look for places in your life where you can squeeze in 30-60 minutes of reading. My best place to read is my daughter’s Saturday morning ballet class. Her class lasts an hour, which is long time for me to dive into my reading, yet simultaneously short enough that I stay focused on what I want to accomplish.
• Carry articles with you so you can read when you have time. I keep a stack of professional reading in my car, along with post-its and pens. If I arrive somewhere fifteen minutes early, I’ve got something to read while I wait.
• Balance reading for detail and reading for the main idea. Students who are very detail oriented can get overly caught up in the fine points of an article and miss the main idea, while other students have the opposite tendency. I find it helpful to think about the following as I read: What is the author’s thesis or main idea? What evidence does the author offer to support his or her thesis? Does this evidence support the thesis convincingly? And, finally, how does this article relate to other assigned readings or course materials?
• Read with a pen in hand. Making notes in the margin as you read will help you process what you are reading, improving both your understanding and your retention. These notes will also be helpful later when you refer back to the article. I also find it useful to write a one paragraph summary of each article at the top of the first page. This forces me to synthesize the main idea, again improving my understanding and retention of the author’s argument, and if I pick the article up again a few years later, I have a handy summary of the content.  

In my last post I provided basic guidelines for posting to course forums. In this post, I’m going to suggest content for a these posts.

The goal of posting to the forums is to engage others, specifically the instructor and your peers, in discussion. In order to start a discussion or contribute to an ongoing discussion, you need to say something that goes beyond just summarizing the required readings (which presumably we’ve all read). Instead, you want to post an idea or question to which others can respond, just as you would in a face-to-face class.

• Ask questions. If you have a question about a reading or course topic, chances are others in the class have the same question. The instructor may even be waiting for someone to ask the “obvious” question.
• Share your experiences. Posts that provide real world examples of course concepts are always appreciated by other students and can result in interesting conversations about how libraries implement services in different ways to best meet their users’ needs. Students who haven’t worked in libraries can share their experiences as patrons, prompting us to think about what these services look like from the user perspective (those of us who have worked in libraries for a long time sometimes lose that ability to look from “the outside in”).
• Invite others to share their experience. Posts like “This is really interesting; how many of you have had this experience?” or “How do you handle this at your library?” give classmates a chance to respond with their own expertise.
• Question the status quo. Students who are new to the program or who have not worked in libraries sometimes feel uncomfortable posting on a topic they sense others know more about – but your “newbie” perspective is valuable because it prompts us all to question and evaluate our traditional way of doing things.
• Extrapolate from one setting to another. Articles in the library literature often focus on research or best practices in a specific library setting, such as a school, public or academic library. Rather than have students read three articles about a topic, one written for each setting, the instructor will pick the best article about the topic, regardless of setting. Thus the forums can be a place to discuss how an idea from the reading can be applied to or modified for various types of libraries and patrons.
• Evaluate the author’s argument. Do you think the author is right (if you are just agreeing with the author, that’s not such an interesting post) or wrong (this could be an interesting post!)? If the author is wrong, why? If you disagree with parts of the author’s argument, why? Instructors often pick readings because they are provocative and lead to good discussion, so don’t assume that just because an article is required reading it is “right.”
• Synthesize multiple readings. Discuss how multiple readings relate to one another in order to draw larger conclusions about professional practice. Most obviously, you can pull together ideas from the readings for one week in the course, however you can also integrate a current reading with materials from past weeks or with readings from other courses, particularly core courses that other students would have taken.

Additional thoughts on posting to forums:

• Read with a pen in hand – writing in the margins as you read will help you engage with the material and better retain what you have read. You can also use your pen to jot questions or other ideas for forum posts as you read.
• Don’t be afraid to disagree. Disagreeing with others (in a respectful way, of course) is great, because it builds a conversation and challenges us to think more critically. Not sure you disagree? Act as the devil’s advocate – pull out counter arguments for others to consider.
• Do your part to create a community of learners. People need to know they are being “heard” – you can be a good citizen by posting occasional replies like “well said” or otherwise acknowledging the contributions of others.

Note: I haven’t posted in a few weeks while I took a much needed vacation and prepped for summer session. The break between spring and summer sessions is the longest one of the year for me, so in addition to just taking some time off to rejuvenate, I took the opportunity to really dig into my reference course and make changes in assignments. But, as summer session starts, my mind again returns to my teaching and this blog.

My summer courses have been going for less than a week and our forum discussions are just getting started. As a result, I’ve been thinking about what makes for a good forum post and a good class discussion. Following my own advice (see the third point below), I’m breaking this into two posts – today’s focuses on basic guidelines for posting; later this weekend I’ll share suggestions for developing the content of posts.

And so, with no further ado, some basic guidelines for forum posts:

• Limit yourself to one topic per post. This makes it easier for the class to have “threads” of conversation as people reply to you. If you have more than one idea to share, write multiple posts.
• Give your posts specific, meaningful titles. Your title should describe the content of your post so that we know what to expect. In general, avoid using the week’s topic or the name of the forum as a title. After all, in the Collection Development forum, all the posts should be about collection development, right? Try titles like “Print vs. Electronic” or “Thoughts on Weeding” instead.  
• Be succinct. I don’t want to discourage you from diving into a topic in depth – by all means, write enough to make your point clearly. At the same time, remember that your writing will be read online, a format where many people have trouble with sustained reading. If you have written more than three or four paragraphs, you may be rambling – re-read your post with an eye to brevity and clarity.
• Proofread and spell-check. Posts with spelling and grammatical mistakes appear unprofessional and are more difficult for others to read. Remember that your classmates and I are your future colleagues – our impression of your ability to communicate clearly and professionally is based largely on your forum posts and they should reflect the same care you would take in writing an email or document for work.
• Post in a timely way. In my courses, we devote one week to each topic. Your posts on the topic should generally fall within this time frame; people do not want to read your thoughts on the topic two weeks later, when the class has moved on to a new issue, and probably will not respond to you. (The exception to this guideline is when you discover an interesting resource or news event that you want to share with others.)