UBC Mailing Lists 17.0 - TEAMLEARNING-L Archives

I teach History courses online occasionally but mostly via video conferencing to 3 remote sites around our 2-year college "service area" in addition to students at the main site with me. After noting the intense "us v. the world" bonding mentality of the remote video sites and trying to find some way to turn that remote site 'separate and not equal" weakness of the medium into a strength, I literally lucked into winning a copy of the TBL book at a conference :) My video teaching life has been changed by this technique with a much more learning and application centered classroom, but more crucially for this medium, a much more interactive and inclusive class experience for ALL sites. Each site is a team and all in-class activities (or 95% of them at least) are team based application activities.

Only hitch in the giddyup I have is with the RAQs (Readiness Assessment QUIZZES which based on recent dialog here I will be changing to a different title next quarter!). My RAQs are only 4-5 questions long (in large part due to the structure of the text chapters and density of material) yet I have never had much luck with the challenge piece post quiz OR in getting "educatative" dialog going about the questions vs. fishing for parsing answer choices to win some points back. So much so that I have in recent quarters, simply ditched the appeals process and instead, "harvest" data from missed questions to then drive the following sessions' activities and focus. This has been working good, with me emphasizing the following class period that we are focusing and doing what we are as it is the areas the RAQs spotlighted as weakest as a class. However, I am concerned that this break with TBL orthodoxy is costing the class an opportunity or I am missing out on some key dynamic for even better TBLing??