Driving Student Engagement in an English Class

David Blakesley  5:16  
Okay, thank you, Brian. And I'll just tell you when I'm ready for the next slide. Okay, that sounds good. Thanks for attending everybody. as Brian mentioned, I'm at Clemson University, which is in South Carolina. I've been here a little over 10 years. My background in English is in rhetoric and the teaching of writing, writing across the curriculum, that sort of thing. And Clemson has long been a, a very interested in writing across the curriculum, writing in the disciplines, and that sort of thing, and that's one of my areas of specialization. So I'm always I've always been looking for ways to use digital technologies to promote writing. So that students can, of course learn to write better, but also, so that they can use writing to learn content, in not just English courses, but any of their courses across the curriculum. Brian showed that slide from Penn State, if you didn't know what you were doing, and you assign papers, to all those students, can you imagine what sort of life you'd be living, grading, you know, 500 papers. It turns out that when people try to do that, the traditional way that the grading issues become a major hurdle. And in writing to learn pedagogies, we encourage writing every day. And you can imagine what it would be like for the instructor and the whole posse of ta is to try to read all the writing that students were doing, not to mention grading it, recording it, all that sort of thing. And thankfully, there are technologies that can help us address some of those issues and still promote writing to learn. And we've been trying Yellowdig at Clemson now for a few years. Use it primarily in English courses. So first year composition, technical writing, business writing, introductory literature, that sort of thing. But then we are also seeing it used across the curriculum in science courses, engineering courses, nursing courses, that sort of thing. So we continue to use it and and we're trying to do some research on how it can affect student engagement and student learning, which are two of the goals. Pretty much of every course on campus in some some regard. And I've been using Yellowdig in a variety of courses in English that I'll talk to you a little bit about today. I teach technical writing, in summer courses, usually in an accelerated fashion. So I just finished yesterday, a three week technical writing course. That's very intensive, enhanced students using yellowdig. But then, in the regular semesters, 15 weeks semesters, I've taught primarily graduate courses, and use yellowdig there also.

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So, I'm going to talk to you about three things, goals or ways that Yellowdig transforms my writing pedagogy and I think the writing pedagogy that other instructors apply also in the hands of the with engagement and community building and collaboration, and then reflection and metacognition. So I'll talk to you about metacognition last in case you're wondering what that is thinking about thinking. All right, Brian, can you go to the next slide? All right, particularly during the pandemic. And I'm sure this applies to many people across the country and across the world. A major challenge has been to try to get get students to engage with our courses and the course content. When we can't rely on traditional face to face methods, keeping them engaged in their course, courses became critical at Clemson, because you wanted students to continue to make progress and in their degrees and to be active learners and so on. And that can be difficult to manage when the traditional model might be converted maybe into, you know, recorded lectures and, and students watching lectures and taking tests. The level of engagement that we see from that sort of interaction is kind of low, typically. But just in terms of our goals for engagement, you know, we want students to learn course content, we want them to take that learning and connect it to their learning in other courses. That's another way of enriching engagement. So they're seeing connections across their curriculum. And then to connect also that learning to experiences beyond the classroom, both personal experiences and professional experiences. So if they're, you know, interning at an engineering firm, they can take what they're learning in technical writing and writing about and connected to their internships in other courses, and in other situations, that sort of thing. And so, in order to improve student engagement, I've adopted many of the recommendations that the Yellowdig folks give us in their nicely developed pedagogical materials. Originally, when I use discussion forums, I tended to be much more directive. And I would give students topics very specific topics to write about each week.

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That never worked very well. For a number of reasons, but students would typically respond to a topic as if they were responding to me. And they were doing it for a grade. And they wanted to get a score on on their response, they would write their responses at the last minute, right before they were due. And even though I encourage them to discuss their responses with each other, there was no time for that, because the next topic had come out. So they didn't discuss their writing at all. And they were only engaging with me as the instructor. And that's not what I was looking for. And, and the students typically enjoy that also built right down in the second aisle. So I took a less directive approach and just encouraged students to write about topics, somehow related to the course. And that was about as specific as I got. So they could choose their own topics. I set up periods during the course that were usually a week long and so students were encouraged to post early in the week. And then to accrue accolades from the instructor where we can I can reward reward them with extra points, to get reactions from fellow students, emojis, that sort of thing. But then also to encourage other students to comment on their posts. And they could gather points that way. And that less directive approach worked really well. It open space for engaging topics not covered in the class, so students can start to connect to other aspects of their experience in their learning. It reward students for posting interesting ideas for connecting their learning to other work and so on. This screenshot here to the right is from a history of rhetoric, of course, students are writing about Joseph William George Campbell One of the students is connecting George camel, Kenneth Burke's ideas of rhetoric to Frederick Douglass's work on rhetoric and, and you just see a lot of interaction going on. And, and students are really thinking pretty deep about what they're learning in class. We never talked about this in the actual class sessions, which were synchronous.



This just went on outside of class. So let's go to the next slide, Brian. We want students to engage with course content, connect their ideas, what with what others have written, both in Yellowdig, but also in the course, materials. So here's a student writing about George Campbell, who's a 19th century British rhetorician and literary scholar. This is just a small snapshot. But typically, the back and forth among the students would would generate, you know, 10, or 20, comments and responses. So there'd be this extended discussion. I encourage them to quote, often from the course readings, which gives them some common content to talk about. And that makes it more accessible to everybody. So they're not just completely going off on their own tangents all the time. But they're trying to connect what they're reading with their ideas, and then sharing what they're kind of zooming in on with others. And then other people can interpret those quotations however they want. So that that establishing Common Ground is very important. Let's go to the next one brain. We also want students of course, to engage with the world to apply what they're learning in your courses, to two

aspects of their own experience. And in this last year and a half with COVID-19, it became especially important for us to help students connect their learning with what they see happening in the world, which for many of us has been very disorienting, and discouraging, and students are especially susceptible to that. And giving them the opportunity to connect their learning to what they're experiencing in their lives, I think was a great way to encourage the kind of engagement that we want to see all the time anyway. These ways of connecting what they're learning in the class, to their experience, to the experience of others, to their reading.



All of these things helped motivate what we call writing to learn, students become better writers, but they also learn the content better. And it creates what we call active readers. They're not just passively reading text, trying to glean some facts so that they can pass a multiple choice test. But they're trying to put what they've read into different contexts, and to interpret it and think about it, and talk about it with others. So you put all these things together, and hopefully we get some nice, highly motivated, engaged students. And now I'm going to talk to you about why that's great benefit not just to the students, but to the instructors. And I think this is what many of you probably are really interested in. So let's go to the next slide. Right. When I used discussion boards in even stand standalone discussion boards or discussion boards in something like Canvas, I found that much of my time was spent recording what students had written. So counting, counting words, counting discussion posts, and in Canvas, if for those of you who use that, that can be really difficult to track down all their posts, especially in a long course and where you're encouraging them to write often. We're talking about a lot of material, and all of it had to be recorded in a grade book. So I was doing a lot of reading, recording. Responding a little bit Most of my responses were focused on justifying their grades, or explaining why they got a particular grade. And that as a writing teacher, or as any kind of a teacher, that's not fun work. It takes a lot of time.



And I don't enjoy grading papers. I hate it. In fact, I'm a writing teacher, I don't like marking papers, you know, putting off and frag and stuff like that in the margins. That's not why I got into this. But I do like reading what students write and I like reacting and responding to what they write. And I like rewarding them for things that they do well. Yellowdig has enabled me to focus much more on reading, reacting and responding to student work. And I've been able to spend my time rewarding them for what they do well, engaging them with my own content. And that's been really fun. And that's easy teaching. I think when you're doing that, when you're learning with your students, and dialogue with your students, you learn about them, it helps you learn your course content even better. And you're not wasting all this time on management. Management is not fun. For me anyway. The screenshot here, I'm I've selected is, it's just one of the types of sets of data that you can get in Yellowdig, that will show you how many posts students are creating, how often they're commenting on each other's work, their reactions, so emojis, that sort of thing. Conversation ratios are how much engagement back and forth over time are occurring. My conversation ratio is not as high as I would like it to be. But it's something to work toward. I think our help information from Yellowdig says we ought to shoot for eight or nine isn't right, Brian. So I have to get a little bit better at that. But all I'm getting higher each time. So that's something to work for. Let's go to the next slide.

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Yeah, but before we do that, I do want to say 6.2 is is certainly higher than the average of a sort of typical discussion forum, where if you tell students to make one post, and then comment on two other posts, it would be sort of around to write maybe a little bit higher if you actually get conversations going. So just a note on that 6.2, our recommendation is, is around eight, we sort of don't see any downsides up, you know, up to even above that number, so that you're getting kind of eight comments per post that's created. But 6.2 is still pretty good. And pretty indicative of some good conversations coming off of the posts that are being made. Yeah, and I would say that also is without any management on my part, I'm not going in there and saying comment, or, or and I'm not not be writing them in class saying you guys aren't posting enough. I don't have to do any of that.



This is entirely self motivated. And that's great. It just really explodes. And you can see this is over a semester, I believe or close to a full semester 155 posts, so about 12 per per student. It was fairly small class, but almost 1000 comments 3635 reactions, students I found tend to game the reactions a little bit because I get points for reactions and I've had to tell students to back off, they don't have to react to everything that I post with a thumbs up. I mean, they'll they'll give out you know, 150 reactions to everything. They love it all bunch of hearts and thumbs ups. That sort of thing. But you know, they they have fun with it. I don't worry about it too much. Let's go to the next one. Okay, this is just another screen. This is more recent showing some more data that you can get about the Yellowdig engagements in college. rotations that are going on. This is from a course that I just finished teaching. And Brian can help us maybe interpret some of this data better than I can. This was, this was a three week course. So students had to start posting in Yellowdig, immediately. And that took a little bit of work for them, they had to figure out how to use it, and all of that stuff. And then by the second week, they were getting close to wrapping things up. So what do you see in the scars? Brian, anything interesting?



Brian Verdine  25:38  
Yeah, I mean, in general, we see this type of pattern in communities that are doing reasonably well, which is to say, a lot of people focus on on us standard discussion kind of paradigm or framework on how much students are generating. And we put those variables into our sharing score. So that that score of 68 is an average percentile of the variables that are listed beneath it, how many multimedia items are being shared by your students, I mean, posts and comments, they're making link shared. Um, so this all generative behavior, how much students are putting into the community. And you see two other squares listening score and interacting score, the variables that go into those scores are all around, either consuming information, so reading posts, or viewing viewing posts, taking part in back and forth conversations, actually interacting with students and giving out those reactions and comments. those other two scores are most often high, when students are voluntarily coming back to the community more often interacting with more students, and consuming more of the content that's on there. So if there's one score that we sort of wants to be a little bit lower, it would be this sharing one because the other ones are the ones that are indicate that students are enjoying the experience seeing value in it coming back more often actually interacting with each other and talking about these things. And the sharing screen, you can, you know, try to drive up by just requiring them to make more posts or whatever, but you can't force students to listen to each other necessarily.



You can't force them to actually interact with each other, or to come back, you know, multiple times a week and continue a conversation. And all of those are the behaviors that we really hope to encourage the most in a lot of cases. And so often as you get the listening and interacting scores higher, you see the sharing score go up naturally, the students are voluntarily coming. But in other cases, if students are just posting and they're really not interacting in the community, you'll see the sharing score be high, or, you know, mediocre and then have the other scores be considerably lower. So as anybody might be looking at their own community health scores, maybe that helps interpreted but David, this pattern is what I would want to expect to see if students are truly sort of interacting with and talking about the content. And it turns out that the reading and interacting parts of this are actually the parts that predict student grades the most and predict learning outcomes, and, you know, completing the class and all of that.

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David Blakesley  28:41  
One, I love, being able to see how the students in the course are doing relative to what all yellowdig users are doing. So that's the global, and then the network compares what's happening in the class with what's happening locally, at Clemson. So for example, you notice the at least in terms of globally, the average total word count for my course, is pretty high compared to the global average workout, which is good because it's a writing course. And, you know, I want them to write a lot. These are students who probably don't get much opportunity to write in their courses. And so that's good. But it's just another way of keeping track of how students are doing and, and, you know, something that you can fine tune over time. But I like being able to access that very easily. Okay, let's go to the last one. And this, this way of engaging with the course and with your students is the most important of all, I believe, and it has to do with Time, and how you use your time as an instructor. Professors are busy people, we have a lot more going on than politicians think.



It's not just time in the classroom, but you know, we have research to be doing or publishing to be doing a lot of service activities. And, and I don't want to be spending 90% of my time, filling in scores in a canvas gradebook. This was just a little slice of my gradebook from the tech writing course. You know, like, it goes like, eight screens wide on a 27 inch monitor. And, and I don't want to be plugging in point totals for discussion posts, all day long. I would much rather spend my time responding to students. And so this is just an example on the right of one type of response that I'll post my self esteem was talking about in this was a tech writing course. Talking about Adobe Creative Cloud software, and it mentions a book, he didn't mention the author. But I recognized it ethics demonstrated in geometrical order, by Spinoza, actually, the philosopher and I happen to be writing about Spinoza, and some other work of mine. So I was able to respond and say, here's what I'm doing with Spinoza.



And that was great. I enjoy responding that way. And it's something that the student and I could have in common and talk about elsewhere. But it also tells the students that I'm listening to what he's saying. And that's good. That's very rare in college, when you have a professor respond specifically to something that you've written. Unfortunately, it's fairly rare, partly because we have so many students, and it's so time consuming, to do this sort of thing. So that's a really important way to convert the time spent on management, into time engaging with students. All right, let's go to the next one, just two more slides to go. Throughout all this engagement, these are some of the things that happen somewhat spontaneously, because of students getting engaged and responding to each other, and so on. And this is where it starts to support the kind of writing that I'm interested in teaching. And what I see happening in my courses is a, a somewhat organic community building going on, that fosters collaboration that prepares students to work with each other, outside of class or on collaborative projects that I might want to teach. It fosters identification with students, student to student, they start to share their interests and see that they have common goals, learn from each other. That way, students can see how others respond to things. And that functions as a kind of modeling. where, you know, maybe you have a particularly great writer in a class, students can, can listen and, and and read how these students are responding to things.



And personally, I learn a lot when I, I see other people responding to the work that I'm reading also. So it's a kind of cultivation of imitation, which is important in reading and writing and literacy. Helping students make connections, among things that they wouldn't normally Connect. And having multiple people do this simultaneously fosters invention and creativity. It encourages networking, acting together in the context of their writing. And then one of the most important but least understood has to do with what we call exigency, which I can never pronounce very well. But that's this, you know, this internal motivation to say something and to have it meaningful when it comes out. And if you have exigency, you're motivated to write, you're motivated to communicate, and to be understood. And we know that if you have that, suddenly all the problems that you might have had with writing start to go away. The students who have trouble with grammar and mechanics repeatedly, are often kind of, they don't have sore, sometimes they don't have an intellectual investment in what they're saying. So they don't care that much if it's correct or not. But if you really care about something, and you have this internal motivation to, to say it, someone else, suddenly the grammar gets better. And the mechanics get better, and the, the voice of the student gets stronger. And we know that if you have exigency, that's when you learn to write. And without it, you're just rehearsing. Doing the kind of rote learning that doesn't do anybody any good. So I'm gonna stop there, I think, and then turn it over to my Yellowdig buddies. Who will carry on, I believe.



Brian Verdine  36:23  
Yeah. Um, Thanks, David. That's all really interesting. I definitely have some of my own questions, or comments that I'd like to get your reactions to. But I do want to make sure that we open it up to the floor and make sure that anybody in the audience that wants to ask a question has a chance to do so. And if I don't see any second, I'll just, I'll plan to ask mine. And we'll pick we'll pick some more up, hopefully, in a minute. Um,



David Blakesley  37:00  
I did forget to do the last slide, but I'll let people read that it's kind of self explanatory. There we go.



Brian Verdine  37:08  
Yeah, I thought you maybe we're skipping it on purpose. I



David Blakesley  37:11  
Oh, no, no, I did have a tech writing students say just say this just last week, I really liked Yellowdig a lot and think every class should have this, it is extremely helpful and fun to use. That's a good comment from a student who just started it. But in some ways, it's expressing that exigency that I just was talking about, now that it was fun, and he was writing and learning. And that's exactly the way it should be. And the code for montane is about this idea that people think they have a lot of great ideas. But they just are not eloquent enough to express them. That's a bunch of bunk. You may think you have good ideas, but until you start writing them down and communicating them, who knows what they are. And Yellowdig gives you the opportunity to encourages you to get them down on paper and, and find out what it is that you're thinking. And then to reflect on that too. And that's what we mean by reflection, and metacognition. reflecting on what you say, and write is one of the first steps of learning to write better. So that's all I have to say about that. I'm ready for questions. And



Brian Verdine  38:37  
I was gonna say, I'm missing a couple of windows, I think behind my presentation. So I'm going to jump out of that quickly. And I see there's a couple things in the q&a. So I'm, in a traditional face to face class, do you separate your day grades from class participation grades or lump these together, I'm going to class participation grade.



David Blakesley  39:04  
I don't include a participation grade in any of my courses. Currently, because it's pretty difficult to measure, and it's very subjective. And so the yellow day grades are a significant portion of the course grade. I think in the tech writing course, it was 20% of their course grade, which is substantial. It was as much as a major project would be in that course. And what's nice about Yellowdig and canvas together is that the the goals that I would set for students in Yellowdig for each period, which were a week, that would automatically feed back into Canvas, and so students could tell how They were doing in Yellowdig. But they also, that would automatically update in Canvas. So they could see how their percentage was relative to the goal of earning 200 points for the semester. And so that kind of just took it all took care of itself, automatically. The, I do it the exact same way with grad students. And it seems to work just as well. grad students, of course, are a little more self motivated than undergrads. However, they're really good at playing the game stuff.

And they can get sneaky about it. But they're also very self regulating. If one gets sneaky about it, the others will call them out on it.

And so I don't have to worry so much about participation, then, which is tough. But I can just have the participation quantifiable in a specific way. And that seems to work really well.



Brian Verdine  41:25  
Yeah, I assume that some of that was in response to Amy's previous questions, you said, are related to playing the game? Do you ever take away points from students?



David Blakesley  41:36  
I've never taken away points from students. But we have that option, that it would be fairly severe to do that, I think that but I've been very tempted to do it. And it has happened usually near the end of the course, where students, you know, 90% of the students have achieved all they could possibly achieve, and Yellowdig. But there's one or two stragglers who blew it off for most of the semester. And they're trying to get as many points as they can at the last minute. And so they start posting ridiculous things that have nothing to do with the course at all, even remotely. And I've been tempted to take points away from them. However, students who wait that long and start to try to game the system, that way, they're already bombing on yellow t points anyway, they're gonna get, you know, a D, or an F, in that portion of their grade. And what little cheating, you know, cheating in quotes they might try to do at the end doesn't make any difference. So I just let him you know, I let them think that they're getting away with something. But occasionally, I will step in and say, you know, so what does this have to do with rhetoric or check writing? And then they realize they've been kind of called out on it?



Brian Verdine  43:20  
Yeah, we, you know, we see, we hear all manner of what happens in different communities? Well, we definitely found is, you know, if you are, if you're setting expectations are early on in the course, and you make it clear what the community's for most students will honor that. There is the ability to allow them to sort of flag posts. And if you highlight that, for students, it doesn't really get used very often. But knowing that other students can do that is often a deterrent. And really, once students are interacting with one another, and are really part of a community, there's a certain amount of like social capital they have to spend if they start doing these types of things, because other students do recognize it. And then finally, if the instructor is there just a little bit each week and is sort of making it clear that they are paying some attention to what's going on and that they do care, you know that things stay on topic, some very minor bits of feedback throughout the semester can really take care of a lot of of that and then and then if you have to, I guess you take away points, right. But generally speaking, I think we find that it's not the kind of thing that you need to do that often. And, obviously, sounds like you're a little hesitant to do too much of that, but also because you don't feel like you really have had to.



David Blakesley  44:54  
Yeah, I can imagine. Sometimes students might accidentally post the exact same thing. twice, for example, you know, maybe they didn't see that it actually posted or worried about it, I wouldn't have a problem taking away points from them on that. And I would just let them know, it's kind of some of this is related to what George asked in the chat. Are you reading all student posts? And what do you think is your response rate, I read all the student posts early in the semester, and respond heavily. But then as, as the course develops, I pull back more and more, and I will go in and, and comment on things once in a while and, and give out accolades. I end up you know, as the instructor, you earn points. Also, I am one of the top point earners the first couple of weeks. But by the end of the semester, I'm getting a you know, a D. Because I don't, I don't want to body in all the time, deliberately, because I don't want them just responding to me, or perking up when I come into the conversation. But I do it often enough, as Brian mentioned, to, to just let them know that I'm engaged and reading and, and that sort of thing, which seems to work pretty well. I do try to skim most things just to make sure there's nothing really weird going on.

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But I also, as Brian mentioned, rely on the other students to, to self regulate, and self police if something strange happens. We do talk early in the semester about decorum and professional communication. And that there are some principles for how to respond in public, you know, forums like this. And so we have a good conversation about what creates healthy dialogue in these sorts of situations. For example, if you're responding in a thread, and all the students kind of bring this up, when we kind of form our own guidelines, it's good to try to keep the thread going not to just, you know, short circuit the thread and, and go off on a tangent that's completely different from what people have been talking about in a thread. You know, that happens on email discussion lists all the time. Somebody says something really cool. And the conversations go on. And then somebody jumps in and says, oh, by the way, did you see that ballgame the other day? And the whole thing, guys? We also talked about no phaedrus responses. Famous is Socrates, his interlocutor in the dialogue phaedrus by Plato, and famous. Socrates will say all these amazing things about rhetoric and love and madness. And Socrates is not much of a participant in the dialogue. He'll say things like, oh, how true Tell me more. Or it seems so Socrates. So it's a one way conversation, Socrates is doing all the talking. And thinking and Socrates is, is saying things like, well, I thought I understood. But can you repeat that, for me? That doesn't encourage conversation to happen either when people are just saying, great idea, and then nothing else. So there are things like that, that help with response rate and carrying the conversations and don't require any management on my part.

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Brian Verdine  49:04  
I think that the thing that you just said is actually really important to say to your instructors, as well. So, you know, sometimes we'll see instructors, we always say that style matters a lot, versus total amount of participation in the community for instructors. And so one thing we'll see some instructors doing is saying things like, great post, um, but that's not really a conversation continuous, or it doesn't sort of spur additional, ongoing conversation. So if you think something's a great post, it might be better to say something like, Oh, interesting point. You know, I was reading this or that reminds me of that and to try to spur additional conversation or a spring additional kind of response back because if, if somebody says great posts, the only thing that you can respond back is something like Thank you, maybe right, so so like, from the standpoint of an instructor, one really helpful thing is to think about what they can, like add in and how they can encourage continued conversation as they are interacting with students. Um, I want to bring up one slide that just has some of our information on it really quickly. But there is one more question in the chat, I want to try to get covered before we, before we sign off for the day, so I'm wanting to give everybody an opportunity to get a link to our ebook, a new ebook of ours. And if you want to get in touch with David, you can also get on his LinkedIn using these QR codes guy, I don't know if you have links that you were planning on also sharing in the chat, but just wanted to bring those up. And the one last question in the q&a that I see is, how do you prevent students who wait until the night of the point rollover to finally post for the week? And is there any sort of thing that you you do specifically to discourage that?

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David Blakesley  51:28  
Well, the course is set up in Yellowdig, in terms of how many points they get for posts, and commenting and that sort of thing, to discourage that last minute posting, if they posted the last minute, they're not going to get a lot of comments, or emojis or accolades for that week, from instructors and their peers. So they might be able to do that, but they're just going to get rewarded for that particular post. And that's not enough. But if they do that early in the week, they can post once a week, and, and generate all these comments and all these emojis and so on, and that one post might even get them up to, you know, the weekly goal. So that provides some incentive not to do the last minute posts. And the comments that are, you know, I agree, great point, that sort of thing. I do set word thresholds that they have to try to achieve. For a post. I make that, I don't know, 150 words, something like that. And that comments have to be a certain length. Also, in order for them to gather gain points for the comment. I tend to make mine a little bit higher, mostly because they're writing courses. But so a comment might need 75 words. That seems like a lot. I can't remember how much I set it at.

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Brian Verdine  53:14  
Maybe they recommend around 44 posts and 20 for comments. But you're right, you're doing writing class.

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David Blakesley  53:22  
Yeah, I think maybe 75 per posts and maybe 30 or something for comments. So they do have to say something beyond I agree, great point, to earn anything, they can still say that, but they don't get any points for it. So they're not gaming the system many. And in any case. And I remind them of the strategies for posting early and often all the time. You know, make it easy on yourself. Do it early. And it'll just run itself.

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Brian Verdine  54:01  
A really concrete way that you can, like encourage that as an instructor is just to tell them that, you know, you're going to accolade things earlier in the week more often, right? Just because of when you check, you know, yeah, you know, spend most of your time checking in the Yellowdig and stuff like that. And if they notice, or you tell them, there's gonna be some part of the pattern there, they'll they'll definitely come in sooner. Well, I want to thank you, David, since we're about out of time, I want to give you a chance to have the last word if you would like, um, I did think your point about intellectual plays super important in sort of building people's curiosity and, and it sounds like that's what you're really encouraging in your communities. So thank you and if you have anything you want to say, leave us out.

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David Blakesley  54:57  
Well, intellectual play, you're exactly Right, Brian that gets at the heart of my whole philosophy of teaching writing, the more we can encourage that kind of play, the better students will write. But also, the more they'll learn, the more they'll be able to elaborate uncertainty. Which is the kind of fundamental principle of rhetoric. since its beginning. In ancient Greece, Aristotle and Plato, we're teaching students to generate content through intellectual play. And the more we can do that for our students, the more they learn, the better they write, and all kinds of good things come from that. So thank you for all for coming. I put my email address in the chat box if you want to email me, that's fine also. All right. Thank you again, David. Okay for everyone for attending.