Hi, Amie. Great questions. With regards to student submissions, they are all electronic, however there are options to upload scanned or photos of student work. The student-teacher interaction takes place via email or online using the Problems of the Week environment. We are exploring additional collaborative opportunities for teachers — including discussions — but this iteration is focused on sharing the teachers work and discussions and conversations took place outside in a variety of mediums (most recently, google hangouts).

While we don’t have a specific answer to this question, we are actually exploring that question. Specifically, based on our prior work, we do have conjectures about online community cultivation. Primarily, we have found that leaders are important for the cultivation and sustainability of online community and, while it may be possible to cultivate leaders online, our primary successes have been developing leaders onsite. However, as the project has progressed, we have begun to (a) create hybrid environments where leaders can continue activity and (b) use the leaders to “seed” the wholly online community cultivation activities. We are beginning (b) this summer and should have preliminary data by the fall.

Our participants were drawn from a wide array of backgrounds and connections — some with previous connections to the Math Forum, others with more broad connections to other, more amorphous online math communities, and others that responded to our solicitation for participants online and at NCTM. We are currently exploring differences between these groups.

Hi, David.

We’ve had a number of different settings that they interact — primarily online courses (for credit) and free non-credit workshops offered by the Math Forum. Each has provided different affordances and constraints. We are also in the process of coordinating PD with a few districts to start next year. Glad to talk more about any of these…

- Jason

Hi, Joni. Aw would be expected, we have much lower persistence with individuals or groups of teachers — for obvious reasons we are able to get at least 10-14 weeks of persistence with students who participate as part of an online (for-credit) course. We have two approaches towards motivation and recruitment: First, based on previous work, we seek to leverage “high achievers” and our students as seeds for broader community engagement and cultivation – these folks are able to develop more personal relationships with participants and this seems to support (continued) engagement and persistence. Second, part of our design is to work closely with teachers to design and re-design the environment to not only serve our intended purposes (specific professional development, teacher learning, and community cultivation), but to be recognized by the participants as meaningful activity. This is not trivial and we have found subtle adjustments — like language and introductory “tone” can make a huge difference.

On another note, I think this video discussion platform is quite well done and do have some thoughts about how it might fit a need we have in some of our online work. I’d love to touch base with you offline of that’s ok.

At this point, no. But we are actively exploring a new project that would do exactly that – bring a dynamic geometry environment together with EnCoMPASS to scaffold meaningful talk, engagement, and feedback for students and teachers. If you’re interested, perhaps we should talk .