Online Class Participation

October 7th, 2011

At the new (and cool!) Digitopoly blog, Josh Gans has a post about his use of online class participation in his MBA class.

or my new Network and Digital Market Strategy course at Rotman (both MBA and undergrad), I decided to ‘go virtual’ with, at least, the assessment of participation. Instead, students will be graded for online participation atrotmandigital.wordpress.com. The beauty of this is that I have a digital record of participation — removing one issue with assessment.

It has been going for about three weeks now and you can see there is plenty of activity. There is also provision for students to ‘like’ the comments of others. You’ll also notice that all of this is public; my theory being that managers often have to engage online and with the public in their jobs to explain their positions and point of view. Why not start at business school developing those skills? I think you’ll also find some of the discussion, links and data the students bring to issues to be quite interesting.

Would not the same reasoning apply to lawyers? How much attorney-client communication today is electronic, rather than in-person? Teaching effective electronic communications–outside of lengthy briefs and IRAC memos–is ripe for the teaching.