Minghua's Sep Update

Hi, everyone:

My assignment is for my Money and Banking class and it has three phases. The first phase is to ask them to make choices based on their instinct or previous knowledge 1) choose between stock and bonds as an investment option, 2) pick up three favorite stocks 3) pick up favorite bonds. The first phase of my assignment is due the second week of the semester. They posted their answers on WebCT at designed individual cubbie. I did not ask them to comment on each other's posts. Instead I read each of their post and wrote one commment for each of their posts. Fortunately there is only 9 students in this class and I had to write only 27 comments maximim (I could not do this for my ET101 class with 24 students). One student did not post his answers on time and another student only answers one of the three questions. The rest of the students all did a very good job.

By and large I think it works fine for me. For the second and third phases I will introduce more interaction by requiring them to write peer reviews: respond to two of their peers's posts.

Here is another reason I love blog: you can post the link. However I cannot with WebCt discussion board. But you can visit my class discussion board as viewstudent. It is a public user account used by a lof of instructors. The user name is viewstudent and the password is webct. After signing in you can scroll down the list of all courses and my course is Money and Banking ET223. The discussion board is named as Investment Guru Forum.

Minghua's respond to August Check in: My plans

Hi, everyone:

Sorry for coming so late. As I mentioned in my presenation back in August, I use WebCT as the platform for my online assignments. I love blog but I rely on WebCT to assign homework, release notes to the students, let them monitor their grades, etc. And my impresssion is that students might have a hard time to keep track of both WebCT and a separate blog site. Keith and I had the coverstation the other day and we agreed that it would be wonderful if there is a blog site that will also provide the other features that blackboard/webct offer. In that case I will definitely switch to blog.

Anyway, I still use WebCT discussion board to assign the Investment Learn Curve projet I proposed. Each student is assigned one cubbie and post their comments there. It is easier for me to keep track and give them credit accordingly. For the first post, I do not require them to respond to each other but I will post my comments for each of them. For the second and third post I will require them to write comments for their peers.