How blogging can be used in large classes is not as immediately obvious. Many assume that once the class is large enough to exclude, for example, written term papers, it also means blogs are out. By that definition, a “large class” might be as few as thirty or forty students, depending on the composition of your university. My experience of using blogs in larger classes includes classes ranging in size from about fifty students to those that include nearly four hundred students.

Just as with smaller classes, there are a number of ways in which blogs may be deployed to help with the learning process in a large class. The most obvious example is the single teaching blog, something of a replacement for other forms of course management software. In this form, the blog acts as the central communications organ of the course, with links to the syllabus and schedule, and posts for assignments, handouts, news items, and course discussions.

This is, naturally, a fairly “low-intensity” use of blogging in a course. For small courses, instructors often make the students authors of the blog as well. This can work for large courses, but it can lead to a bit of a mess if you have students writing on a regular basis. If only a subset of the students write posts each week (and the remainder post comments), then things become a bit more manageable, but this sort of participation may lead to more administrative overhead than it is worth.

One of the advantages to the single course blog is that it provides another place for students to ask questions, and those questions remain public. One alternative is to ask students to comment each week in the comments of the course blog. At first, this may seem as onerous as allowing them to post, but that is not necessarily the case. If you look for large-audience blogs outside of education, it is not unusual for some posts to attract hundreds of comments. If a large number of comments are expected, one of the various Slashdot-style plugins that allow viewers to rank up or down comments on the page can be an interesting and useful addition.

The other alternative is to set up either blogs for small groups of people or individual blogs. In my experience, working with group blogs carries with it many of the logistical difficulties of working with groups in a large class, with the additional difficulty of managing the blogs. For that reason, even in very large classes, I usually have students set up blogs individually.

The same sorts of questions apply when choosing a blogging platform for large classes as do when looking at small classes. The grouping functions of Livejournal can be helpful, although for especially large classes they may not scale well. Other free blog hosts: Blogger, WordPress, Edublogs, among others, are all good choices. I have tried mixed-blog classes, requiring only that students use a blogging system that provides RSS feeds, but in terms of support for new users this can become difficult.

It is helpful to aggregate blogs for small classes, and vital for large classes. Unfortunately, there is not a single, easily used solution for creating an aggregator for a large class. It is a good idea to plan for some time to collect the urls of students blogs, along with their true names. I have done this over email, set up a special web form to collect the data, and even integrated this with a Lylina aggregator that was altered to allow anyone to add their information. There are some early tools that can help with this, but generally it may be easier, if time consuming, to collect these via email or on paper and enter them manually into an aggregator (and your grade book).

The biggest barrier to large-scale blogging? Every blogging class has a small contingent of students who have a great deal of difficulty understanding how to blog, and of course this group grows proportionately with the size of the class. There are several strategies that can be used to mitigate this. First, choose a single platform, and one that already has helpful resources and tutorials you can provide to students. A quick search will turn up tutorials for a number of platforms. Second, seek out your most experienced bloggers in the class who are willing to help the neophytes. The culture of blogging often attracts those who are willing to help others get a handle on things. Finally, plan for this hurdle. Once cleared, students are usually off and running, but instructors often overestimate students’ exposure to blogging and facility with computing generally.

Evaluation

Naturally, the reason most teachers forgo blogging in large classrooms is that reading and grading and responding to hundreds of blog posts every week seems impossibly time consuming and counterproductive. Students are accustomed to the idea that their written assignments are graded on a timely basis, and despite the size of the course, may expect that if they spend the time writing, they should be getting a response.

One of the reasons that blogging is pedagogically such a nice tool is that it takes the focus off of the instructor, and your evaluation policy should reflect this. Like all writers, students want feedback on their work, and indeed, that sort of feedback is often what motivates bloggers outside of the class context. In each of my courses, I require students to comment on each others blogs as well as write in their own. This might appear to only increase the amount of grading left to the teacher, but in practice it provides students with the opportunity to have a different kind of audience—and audience of their peers. It also encourages conversations, which is at the root of the blogging experience. A good aggregator—preferably one that presents all posts sequentially (sometimes called a “river of news” format)—provides students with a way of locating interesting posts to comment on.

As a practical matter, then, grading can take several forms. Generally, I let students know that they will be formally evaluated (i.e., graded) not on each post they make, but only several times during the semester. I often scan the entire class during the first few weeks of each semester, to make certain that everyone is getting the hang of things. I then set up groups of students I monitor on a weekly basis, cycling through several of these groups and not so much grading as making comments and responding.

In a large class, you will not be able to do much about the mechanics of writing or details in the way that students present their arguments. Generally, if I see something that is a common error, I will make a short posting on the course blog. Like other forms of low-stakes writing, the idea here is to encourage students to express themselves, to get in the habit of writing, and to find other writers in the class to model themselves after.

In many of my courses, I have attempted to integrate popularity of blogs, or “buzz,” as part of the course evaluation. This has met with varying degrees of success. An attempt, for example, to develop a karma system like that found on Slashdot, and to attach a grade to karma, led to the formation of blocks of students who promised to rank each other highly. Rather than quantifying buzz, I now let students know that their objective is to engage in a distributed conversation, and that therefore comments from other students and from those outside the class provides an indication of their success in blogging.

There are other approaches to evaluation, many borrowed from other forms of journal writing, that are also effective. Students may choose at the end of the semester, for example, to be evaluated on several posts that they feel best represent their efforts, or an instructor may choose posts at random to evaluate. At its root, however, the idea is that the activity of writing itself is beneficial to the student, and provides an opportunity to open up a dialogue among students that is rarely possible in a large classroom