Using Instant Messaging Chat to Engage Students On-line
by Evelyn Beck
Unlike many of us who find it distracting when students whisper to one another during class discussions, Alvin Wang encourages such student-to-student “messaging.” Only he does so on-line during live synchronous communication, or chats, with students sending Instant Messages visible only to one another as the larger class discussion carries on. Wang, a psychology professor and the interim dean of the Burnett Honors College at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, finds that both the live chat interaction and the student-to-student IM-ing about class-related material helps create a personal environment so often lacking in virtual education.
“When we have synchronous communication, it enhances the social presence of the instructor,” he says. “It elevates interest in the class, encourages better performance, and facilitates learning communities. In asynchronous communication, there is no social presence of the instructor. The student has no idea what the instructor is like. And students are less motivated to want to perform well and ask questions.”
Wang’s students gather on-line for voluntary 90-minute chats that have led students to rate their on-line experience with him their best ever. He gets around the problem of scheduling by holding “mirror” chats at alternate times—once during lunchtime and again during an evening—a strategy that, admittedly, places extra demands on the instructor. And the 90-minute format may be a bit exhausting for some; in my experience, 60 minutes worked well, though much depends on the number of students; some facilitators recommend limiting chat sessions to half an hour. With more than 12 or 15 participants, class management becomes a real challenge.
In fact, handling the chaos is one of the vital skills emphasized by those who tout chat in on-line classes. For example, says Wang, asking the wrong kind of question can inspire mass confusion, with 30 people typing in “What did you mean?” He advises that questions be concrete and not inordinately difficult. In a statistics session about how to use graphs and tables, he might ask a student to identify the point where two lines in a graph intersect. And rather than asking the class at large for a response, an instructor can avoid screen clutter of dozens of identical responses by calling on individual students.
“I will strategically ask a question of different students, especially those who have been quiet in the chatroom,” says Wang. “It puts all students on notice that when they enter the classroom, they have to be paying attention.”
Jennifer Hofmann, the president of nSync Training in Branford, Conn., and the author of Live and On-line!: Tips, Techniques and Ready-to-Use Activities for the Virtual Classroom (Pfeiffer, 2004), takes a similar approach, though she may post the discussion topics on the discussion board ahead of time to let students think through them, and during the chat she likes to give students five- or ten-second “warnings” that she’ll be calling on them. She also suggests posting questions on a white-board, and providing time limits, such as “30 seconds to do this.”
As for the content of chat sessions, Hofmann uses topics to which the students need timely feedback, or where they might get stuck and need help before they can move on—such as making sure that cell structure is clear, before moving forward in anatomy and physiology. Where the topics pose fewer roadblocks—such as how to deal with difficult patients in nursing—she finds that the asynchronous discussion board is a good tool.
“The discussion board is great for people who want to sit and process, whose learning style pushes them that way,” she says. “Chat is a better engagement technique for people who want instant feedback that doesn’t have to be perfect.”
Other suggestions are to use students’ names frequently during the chat, and to post the transcripts for review by all students, including those who could not attend. And the wise instructor prepares ahead of time, keeping material handy to post quickly into the chat room and having the topics of discussion ready and organized.
“Unless you plan ahead, it’s hard to keep people engaged,” says Hofmann. “You need to constantly ask questions and ask for feedback.”
If conducted effectively, live chat sessions that make use of Instant Messaging technology are at least as physically draining as an hour spent pacing back and forth in front of a chalkboard. In fact, the energy required is likely to be greater as the instructor must orchestrate a symphony of voices into a cohesive whole. On the other hand, the payoff can be enormous, and the chat experience can transform the on-line experience for both students and teacher, allowing for an exciting give-and-take not often present in distance education.
“Learning is a constructive process,” says Wang. “People learn because they need to learn, and they learn most effectively when helped by a mentor or instructor who allows them to build on their knowledge base. If a student is simply reading the instructor’s postings, as happens in asynchronous communication, they may as well just be reading out of the textbook.”
