 Evaluating participation in an online community is as difficult and rewarding as it is in a face-to-face community. How do you do it? Do you put up X number of posts or 200 words weekly or three replies? It's difficult to measure because we have to guard against measuring that which is easy to measure versus that which is necessary to measure. So one of the things that I try to look for is not quantity which is easy to measure but rather some kind of measurement of quality. And for me that can sometimes involve actually mapping out who is talking with whom and using various kinds of network metrics to see, well who's the person who is the key player in all of this? Who is the bridge between different groups of different conversations? Who's the person whose interaction is the catalyst for larger conversations or longer conversations? And obviously this takes a lot of monitoring on my part but by identifying those people whose contributions come at a timely or critical juncture and encouraging them or focusing on them and using them as allies as it were, it helps to actually foster that sense of community. To evaluate students' participation online is very easy. With synchronous style learning they have to log in. So you know who's attending and there's a record of everything that has happened. So there are ways of data mining this to evaluate or to measure student participation. How many times did they type in something? How many times did they turn their microphone on? It's really very simple, quantitatively. Qualitatively, because you know who is speaking you have a name to the face or a name to the chat box. If you spend a little bit of time to assess quality then it becomes quite trivial to again evaluate students' participation. And indeed it is something that I found or I thought was very important when I first started teaching in the synchronous webinar format. I wanted students to attend. I didn't want them to think that this is just an online course where it's going to be recorded and it's their ticket to not come to class. On the contrary, I wanted them to attend because I wanted to make it clear that there was very valuable stuff that was going on live that they would miss out if they were just looking at the recording later on. So I made attendance worth something and participation worth something and it's fairly easy to evaluate because you have the record of what's going on. Because so much of the activity and engagement is occurring within teams and so many of the activities of the course involve these students doing things in their teams. There is a peer evaluation component in the course and this peer evaluation component has each of the team members that evaluate their peers. In terms of a rubric that is very much related to the nature of the types of things we're expecting a student to do being part of a team. We do the evaluation twice in the course. We do it halfway through the course on a formative basis. So that students are basically put into a situation where they have to provide feedback to their teammates but it's not for any marks per se. It's simply to inform their teammates while the course is still going on what they are thinking about each of their peers and their peers' contributions and perspectives and how they're taking leadership and supporting their teammates, etc. That process is then repeated at the end of the term on a summative basis at which point it then contributes to the mark that a student receives. In addition there is a major assignment that's submitted at the end of the course and this major assignment is a team-based assignment. And the peer evaluation mark that a student receives is then used in determining the mark that that student will receive for the major team-based assignment at the end of the term. In both of the courses that I've designed online, one of the things that I wanted to really ensure happened was modeling or at least stimulating to some extent the experience that students have in my face-to-face courses that are the same. And in my face-to-face courses what I do is I always have students tend to be large classes divided into small groups that they work with throughout the term. And they have a lot of opportunity to collaborate with one another, discuss the course content with each other, develop relationships, work together, so they're learning a whole set of skills. And that setting feels really nice in a face-to-face classroom because students feel like they really are getting to know their classmates. They have lots of opportunities to share their ideas. I get to know them because they're working in those small groups. So it makes a large class feel like a small class. So I wanted to translate that into the online setting, but of course it's much easier to do it face-to-face than it is online. So we had to think through really carefully how would we design the course so that it would simulate to some extent that same experience. So thinking through how would we set up groups for students, how would they collaborate with one another, how many times do they need to post. One of the things that happened in the last course that I designed, the Women's Studies 101 course, was I was sort of struggling with how much feedback I needed to give and how often I needed to be in the classroom and how much the students needed to post in order to ensure that they were meeting the learning outcomes. And the designer said to me, so when you're in a face-to-face setting, do you require students to provide evidence that they are participating in these discussions? And I said, well, I can see that they're doing it. So no, I don't. And so she said, well, do you need them to do that online? Is it the experience that you want them to have just having those conversations, or do you actually want to see evidence that they're doing something for a grade? And I said, well, I really, it's all about the experience. I want them to share with one another. And so that was a really pivotal moment for me because I realized, oh, this doesn't exactly translate. And in fact, what I'm doing in the face-to-face course makes a lot of sense. This is all about engaging them with the content, getting them to make connections and meaning out of the things that they're learning. I don't need to give them a grade for that. And so I had this like, oh, I probably don't need to do that in the online course either. And so I thought that that was really important because having that external perspective really shifted my ideas about what I wanted them to do online. And as a result, I've really changed how I've structured some of the courses in terms of assessment because I do want to privilege their experience and their engagement over, am I going to check this? I completed this online discussion, I contributed something to it, so therefore I get a point. That's not really what teaching and learning is all about for me, so I think that was really important.