Discussion Statistics

in Posts

I will soon post some statistics we gathered about discussions to give you a sense of where you are relative to others. While the quantitative metrics are not used directly, they are a good proxy (they correlate well).

We will post the scores (canvas willing) as grading comments in the assignment Discussion Participation Scores (assuming Canvas lets us do this without actually posting a grade).

The initial posting is for the first 7 weeks.

How to interpret the numbers:

  • Total posts - this includes the 14 (if you did them all) initial posts and any followups - the mean (32) and median (31) are below 3 additional posts per week guideline (which would be 35).
  • Discussion Replies - the number of replies that you’ve made in “Online Discussions”
  • SF Replies - the number of replies that you’ve made in Seek and Finds (the average is 8)
  • Cumulative Followup Quality Score - this is the TAs subjective assessment of the discussion replies over the time period. The mean is 17, and the median is 14. But this doesn’t consider seek and finds. While there are other factors, 10 or less is pretty poor performance.
  • Average followup length - historically, this has correlated with quality - but we don’t read too much into it.

Hopefully, from this you can get a sense of where you stand with online discussions for the first 7 weeks.