Eve Riskin
Eve Riskin
Electrical Engineering
University of Washington, Seattle Campus
Using EPost to be Responsive in a Large Course
Eve Riskin, professor of electrical engineering, was amazed to learn she would be teaching three times as many EE341 students in Winter 2004 than the previous quarter. She knew she would need more help than the 25 percent increase in Teaching Assistants could provide. So she turned to EPost, a Catalyst discussion board tool she had used before in two smaller classes at the suggestion of colleague Mari Ostendorf, and was hooked.
"If you have a large course and you want to be responsive to your students, EPost is the way to go," says Riskin. "It's a very convenient management tool."
Riskin let the 146 students in EE341
Even though the Winter 2004 course was large, Riskin's teaching rating did not suffer the usual drop one might expect. "I think EPost enabled the students to feel involved in the course and to be getting some kind of input from or contact with the professor," concludes Riskin. "I felt I was able to be as responsive to my students as they needed because of EPost."
Encouraging Peer-to-peer Interaction
Riskin found with the EPost discussion board that sometimes students would start answering each other's questions. Not only were they helping their fellow students, they were also helping themselves.
"Encouraging students to participate gives them a chance to show off what they know and is a nice way to get to know them," notes Riskin. "It also gave me something to write about in a letter of recommendation for one student who answered a lot of questions."
Tool Helps with Managing the Course Efficiently
In years past, Riskin had used email to answer questions from students. After responding to "I don't understand how to do question 17" and then getting the same question later in the day, she found it extremely inefficient to type her answer all over again if she hadn't saved the first email. With EPost, she can answer a question once on the discussion board and the information is immediately available for any other student in a similar quandary.
"Another nice feature of EPost is that it can give you numbers on who posts," says Riskin, who was amazed to learn she had posted 134 messages, or 34 percent of the EPosts for EE341. "It's an easy-to-use tool, and the Catalyst staff are wonderful," she explains. "They respond quickly when you have questions and they showed me how to delete messages and generate statistics. I once had a suggestion for a feature I wanted and they had it implemented within a couple of days."
Other Catalyst Tools Used
Riskin found two other Catalyst tools useful in teaching her large class:
- She set up an E-submit turn-in area for students to turn in their labs and found it particularly useful when they were doing Matlab files.
- She also made anonymous email (UMail) available and found it a good alternative for students not comfortable saying something on EPost. If it was useful information or a good idea, she responded to the whole class or on EPost herself.
by Kay Pilcher, 2004
Please note: EPost has been replaced by GoPost, which offers expanded features to support online discussion and collaboration.
E-Submit has been replaced by Collect It, which offers expanded features to gather files, provide feedback, and return assignments online.