More WetPaint

In January 2008 I blogged about WetPaint as a tool for teaching. Since then, the tool has improved considerably! WetPaint now has a moderated community for educators to share ideas and get support. It is becoming a full-blown social networking tool, with advanced discussion features, so I decided to try using it this summer for my online Business Information Management class. Although Blackboard is typically used at my college for online courses, recently I've felt stifled by the "instructor centered" paradigm that Blackboard is built around. For this particular course, I wanted students to drive the course content and experience the process of building an online community and information resource. Even with the blog and wiki tools in Blackboard, it just didn't create the kind of interactive wiki environment that I wanted for this course, so I set up a private site in WetPaint (and since it's a site for education, they removed the ads for me too.) It's an experiment, but so far it's working out well!


Here's how I set it up:
Since the students are most familiar with Blackboard, and the course enrollments are managed there, I posted the basic course information and all assignments in the Blackboard course shell with external links to WetPaint wherever necessary. However, WetPaint is the discussion board. I created a menu item in Blackboard that's an external link to WetPaint, so it can be opened within the Blackboard environment. The only downside is that if the student doesn't save their login information within their web browser, they have to log in to the WetPaint site again if they launch it from Blackboard.

I sent an email invitation to all of the students enrolled in the course to become members of the private WetPaint site. For the first week's assignment, I asked them to complete their member profile on the site and include a picture. I also asked them to create a personal home page in WetPaint. Each week, students are asked to blog about specific topics related to the course material. Their blog posts are sub-pages under each student's personal home page.

For the weekly discussion, I ask students to visit at least 3 other people's blogs and add comments during the week. Students are also responsible for moderating and responding to any discussion threads on pages they create. This organizes the discussion by person, rather than by topic - a little different than the typical online course discussion board. I also created a Group Glossary page where students add terms as sub-pages each week. This becomes the class "Wikipedia" specifically relevant to the course.

Here are some of the things I've observed so far:

• Student's Reaction: The new tool definitely pushed students out of their comfort zone, and at first many of them were frustrated about where to find things and how to navigate the environment. I had to do quite a bit of hand-holding and reassuring during the first 2 weeks, but after that the majority of students caught on. To get their reactions during the first week, I created a discussion thread for them to express their feelings about the tool.
  
• Rich Content Options: WetPaint makes it easy to link to multimedia content, and for students to create a library of related content as well. As the instructor, I can include a variety of different types of materials very easily, but students can also add videos, images and other media to their blog pages. This has made the course much more interesting.
• Learning Community: Having pictures and profiles for each student makes the class seem more personal. The discussions also seem much more interactive than in Blackboard. I don't know if it's the environment, or the caliber of students in this class, but it's a lively community!
• Tracking Participation: WetPaint makes it very easy to grade online participation and for everyone to see each other's participation level. Each member profile has a "Contributions" tab where everything the member does on the site is recorded, with links to specific contributions. I created a gradebook item in Blackboard where I recorded each student's WetPaint ID as a cross-reference, so it's easy to find their member profile.
• Moderation: It does take some time to keep the site "tidy" as well as stay on top of the discussions. I set up a basic skeleton for the course, but sometimes students put pages in the wrong places, so I just move them. I've offered up extra points to students who want to help me keep the site organized as the amount of content has grown throughout the quarter.
• Feedback to Students: A couple of nice features of WetPaint are the ability to send Compliments to individual members and the ability to add "To Do" notes on pages. As I'm reading blogs I can click on the author's profile and send a Compliment. This shows up in the member's profile and also as a message to the person. Students seem to really enjoy getting compliments from me and from other students in the class. It helps to build the sense of community. Also, if I think a page needs work (like the blog post is only 3 words...), I can add a "To Do" on the page, that sends a message to the author and notifies me when it's done.

As always, there are a few things I would do differently the next time - I'm learning as I go too. For example, I realized that I could customize the member profile questions and would use this as a Get Acquainted tool during the first week. Also, I might create a template for the "home" pages for each student to fill in initially so they could see the structure of the site a little better, and either create a tutorial video demonstrating how to use the site or have a face-to-face meeting with students during the first week to go through it. This may help to alleviate some of the frustration at the beginning of the quarter.

I think many of the students have enjoyed exploring different features of WetPaint after they got over the initial learning curve. It has outstanding discussion board tools that allow students to control their own online classroom. It may not be for the instructor who needs to feel in control, as the class definitely takes on a life of its own. :) However, I would recommend it as an enhancement to Blackboard, as a complete environment for teaching online, or for enhancing "on ground" classes.