Categories: teaching
Tags: tutoring, groupwork, random
Date: 30 November 2009 20:06:01
So, as many of you know I am currently tutoring on a distance-learning university course. This involves, amongst other things, setting questions to be discussed by the students in an online discussion forum. Up till last week this was just with my own students, but as we've moved into the second block of the course each tutor group teams up with two other groups to fill the discussion out a bit with more people participating.
Last week was the first week of this larger group, led by one of the other tutors (we take it in turns so we only have to do one week in three as lead tutor). The discussion was pretty good, and the students seemed to be interacting really well.
This week it's my turn. The activity is meant usually to relate to the topic which is being studied that week (each unit is meant to take just a week, and then the students move on to the next one), so last week I sat down with the course material so I could read about the topic and think up an activity. Imagine my joy when I discovered that all of this week the students will be learning about my favourite topic.
Group work.
How my heart sank leapt for joy. Regular readers will no doubt remember my utter antipathy to this topic, second only to the even more evil role play. Actually, in all honesty I laughed when I saw it. This, my friends, is irony at its finest.
The activity has been up a couple of days now, so I popped into the forum this evening to see how it was going.
Not a single student has posted anything at all. Not a word. Obviously they love it as much as their tutor.
Normally I would be getting all paranoid about being a terrible tutor and not motivating my students. But in this case, I feel strangely vindicated.