Using Usenet Newsgroups for Class Purposes?

grape jelly asks: "One of my jobs this summer is to help out the chemistry (eek) department figure out how to best introduce and use the newsgroups with the intro courses. A little work has been done by a couple professors here, however, it mostly has been unsuccessful. After surfing the 'Net looking for what people have already done, I have come to the conclusion that most professors either don't use a course newsgroup or haven't really published any of their results. Does anyone out there have any suggestions as to what we could do to solve some of our problems? (Primarily motivating the students to learn to use the course newsgroup, then making sure they use it throughout the semester) Any specific experience from students (or professors, especially) would be very desirable." (Read on...)

While a nice idea, I think educators would be better off using web-based discussion boards for their classes. Discussions can be presented without the limitations of plain text(HTML is useful for something you know), and everyone can use a browser, whereas this isn't necessarily true for newsreaders. However, if educators have a working communications system between themselves and their students and they are using newsgroups to do it, then more power to 'em!

Comments

All my CS classes use them

[bitstream]

I go to the University of Waterloo and all my CS classes make extensive use of private newsgroups.

All the TA's and profs monitor them and respond to students question very frequently and reliably.

The newgroups are only available from on campus computers, but telneting in to read the news is no problem. Telnet and UNIX are also required skills for CS here too. It's just sort of expected that everyone learn how to use the stuff. Some classes even have an Assignment 0 that doesn't count for much but the assignment is to post to the newsgroup or read the webpage or figure out how to do something on Unix (solaris).

It works quite well and honestly, i wouldn't want it any other way. For instance, today i was working on an assigment and got stuck. I posted to the newsgroup and emailed the TA and within the hour she responded and helped me out.

Web pages are useful for relatively static material, but the newsgroups are invaluable for assignment discussion and announcements. It also helps if you can't make it too class. Because anything important you missed (like exam changes etc) will get posted the the newsgroup.

So it's cool. But make sure the newgroups are private on your servers only.

If somebody really needs to post a graphic or a link or something, it's all good because chances are most people are reading news with netscape or outlook anyway.

Why should a professor bother?

[LordNimon]

Most profs have been teaching for years, if not decades. Why should they start using the newsgroups? It's hard enough to get students to come to class, so most professors want to make sure that the students have reason to come to class. If you start using newsgroups, then there will be less incentive for a student to show up, since he can get quite a bit of info from the newsgroup instead.

For instance, he could show up in class only when there will be tests. That wouldn't be the case if he had to go to class to find out when the tests are (ok, it's a weak example, but I still think it proves my point).

Re:Why should a professor bother?

[LordNimon]

Isn't the point to learn the material rather than to keep a seat warm? If the student doesn't show, but learns his stuff and passes the test, congratulations!

Obviously, you've never taught a class.

It's extremely frustrating and disheartening if your class attendance is poor. It's one thing if only a few people sign up for a class - you know how many there are and you can plan accordingly. It's quite another when you spend hours or days preparing for a class, expecting a bunch of people, and only a few show up. It means that even though you made the effort to make the class a worthwhile experience, most people thought it was a waste of time.

Re:Web-based?

[RGRistroph]

I completely agree. Almost every netnews reader completely outclasses slashcode style we discussion groups, let alone that much worse stuff that is used on zdnet or yahoo or other places.

In the past, Taco and Co. have mentioned a usenet interface to slashdot as a possible future feature. This is desparately needed. I will explain why:

-- Web based discussion boards generally lack the ability to quickly see what posts are new when revisting a discussion. In gnus (my newsreader of choice) the old posts would be marked; I could re-read them if necessary but I can also quickly read the replies.
-- You need to allow more flexibility for posters in composition. Yes, I know I could compose this post in emacs and then cut-and-paste it in, but I should be able to read and post from pine or trn or emacs or whatever I want. Browsers just aren't as configureable; when mozilla allows you to use elisp or guile or something to write your own editting modes for forms, that will be a start.
-- You use less bandwidth.
-- To address the lack of HTML complaint: you can post html if you want, many newsreaders will parse it. But actually html is not well suited to short email and post like messages. Sure, I could have composed this using html tags to make a bulletized list. But why ? What about links, you say ? XEmacs (and most other readers) will recognize a URL and make it clickable -- and it's harder to disguise a link to goatse.cx as something else. This sounds like the complaint of someone who hasn't used the netnews enough.

One last thought: I have been trying to get the time to learn how to use gnus score files. It seems to me that if you set up a way to share score files, and to continuous "meta-moderate" a selection of other people's score files as you browsed/read, then you would have a much better way of doing slashdot. Essentially you could automaticaly find that set of moderators that most aggreed with your preferences.

As for educational related use of newsgroups -- I think the main benefit is that one person's question, and the answer, is seen by everyone; so that those people who never ask questions and never visit the professor/TA will benefit by lurking and listening to the more aggressive ones.

Did this ~15 years ago.

[blakestah]

We did this at Duke in the late eighties. A homework assignment would be to make modifications to some computer program (source code posted to the newsgroup), and plot graphs of results when certain modifications were made to the model parameters in the program.

As I recall, it worked pretty well. Common homework questions (confusions) were regularly posted and answered (often by the TAs after a student asked them directly). It provides on thing that would be much more difficult with web access - a place for students to provide direct unfiltered (or filtered) feedback in real time.

The web allows a one way pipeline pretty well - but I think education should be more than that.

Web-based?

[legoboy]

I absolutely hate web-based discussion forums. I deal with it here on Slashdot, but there is no way that anyone is going to convince me that it is easier to communicate on one of these than in a newsgroup.

No one-keypress shortcuts for next message, next unread message, kill thread, etc... Keyword filters are non-existent, the ability to killfile a user is VERY rare.

On a private, passworded (or not) newsserver that doesn't propagate, the email addresses are not harvested, you can keep as long an archive as you like, and you can use whichever newsreader that you like. There isn't anywhere near such diversity and customisability in web browsers.

I don't believe that newsgroups are the climax of communication, but they're just as good as mailing lists, and a far sight better than web-based forums. It's similar to IRC versus the java-based chat that you can find on many websites.

Why reinvent the square wheel?

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Course Newsgroups

[DanMcS]

The computer science department at my school has its own server, and groups for every course. Generally, they are used by students looking for help from one another, though I know the profs and graders monitor them too. Occasionally lab and homework corrections are posted, or notices of due date changes. This is for the comp sci people though, who are expected to be technically competant. For an intro level chem course, it may not be worth the hassle at all; professors would probably be better served by maintaining their own course webpage, or having a TA do it.