The online syllabus

Here are a few on my thoughts after having read Ko & Rossen’s chapter 5 on creating a syllabus (I actually read the whole chapter and found her sample syllabi to be rather convoluted and not something I would be striving to emulate):

1) I found the chapter on the syllabus of little help.  Many of their suggestions were fairly obvious to anyone who has created a syllabus for a F2F class.

2) The one suggestion they made that I would not have thought of was the idea to specify the relevant time zone when all of the assignments would be do.  As a community college teacher I think all of my students will be local but you never know.

3) In terms of implementing one of their suggestions I think I would like to do a video which will include me going through the syllabus while talking about its key components.

4) As far as least likely, I don’t like their insistence that it is crucial that the topics must be associated with actual dates.  Moodle seems to have a nice topic progression where I can highlight which topic we are on to prevent any confusion.

Now I am off to watch Lisa’s Elluminate session on the interactive syllabus…

Episode V of Better late than never

Sorry I just got the Star Wars Saga on Blu-Ray, and like George Lucas I am starting in the middle with Episode IV and now I have moved onto Episode V.  Besides everyone knows The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the six!

Fast track classes seem like such a good idea when you signup to teach them “Wow it will be over by early October!” but then you have to deal with the flood of work until early October.  Well one more week to go and then my work load is reduced.

The chapter on course design did seem to help me focus my thought on at least some of what I want in my course.

1) The general weekly presentation of material: Short PowerPoint presentations (maybe 2-3 of 10 minutes for each week) , probably with camtasia voice overs.  Possibly supplemented with publicly available online lectures, which would be optional for those that were having difficulty or had a deeper interest in the week’s topic.  Also, a brief webpage with a overview of the subject, with some short embedded audio files or possibly Prezi presentations.

2) A number of short primary source assignments (possibly every other week) with answers and the comments on others answers done on a discussion board.  Also I would like to have the students evaluate each others’ work and for that to count as part of the grade for each assignment.

3) Self assessment tests every few weeks with automated immediate feedback, where credit is obtained for just completing  the assignment.

4) A number (probably 3 per semester) of high-stakes multiple choice tests.  Time limited to reduce the use of notes/books, and also with random question/answer order.

5) One or two longer assignments involving primary sources and web research, possibly with students working collaboratively, which also might involve using a site like diigo.

6) Some sort of written final, which I would like to time limit but I am not sure how I would work it exactly.  I wonder if I could have them log in at their own convenience get the assignment and have say 3 hours to upload their completed work.  The subjects they would write on would be randomized out of a list (which would be available a week out)  so there would not be any way one person could go earlier and let the rest know which subjects were on the test.

I looked over the web page on HTML coding a few days ago and in all honesty I was already familiar with most of what Raggett described in his Intro to HTML. While I think knowing a bit about it can give you a good feeling for what is possible and practical in doing a web page, these days with programs like Dreamweaver or Frontpage/Expression (or plenty of others that are simple and free) you can do nice web design without having to learn HTML.

I found some of the presentations on the Prezi site to be very impressive and visually stimulating.  I loved the one on Evolution/A Brief History of Life.  They have quite a few that come up with a history search, and while most seemed inappropriate I did notice some (like a history of metalworking)  that might make an interesting little intermission in my courses.  I wonder if they are public domain or how one goes about getting permission to use them?  I am going to have to look at this site more over this weekend…

Better late than never

Wow just over two weeks since my last blog, I am tardy! While I have been generally keeping up with the reading and conceptual assignments I have been remiss in doing my blogging (which I think violates one of the core principals of blogging which is doing it regularly) so here is my attempt to rectify that.

Having looked over the getting started chart and taken the beginner’s questionnaire (and scored a 17 on it) I feel like I am emphasizing lecture and large group discussions a little too much in my F2F classes. Some of the pedagogical goals I have for the class are:

1) While I currently have about 7 assignments that use primary sources in my average history class I want to modify the type of assignment that I do with them. Rather than just giving everyone the same document and having them provide some straight forward answers and analysis, I would like to assign a number of different sources or give them choices (maybe I will have them signup for them) and in addition to having them discuss the sources I would have them do web research on the background of their document and present their findings to their fellow classmates (possibly on a discussion board)

2) Make sure that they understand some of the connections between a variety of historical events. I would normally do this through PowerPoint assisted lectures combined with some Socratic questioning in a F2F class but I am not as sure if/how I will modify this for an online class. Should I just truncate/split/modify my PowerPoint presentations and do a voice over with something like Camtasia? I am not entirely sure at this point.

3) Especially during the first few semesters I want to do some web polls (I hope Moodle can accommodate this, but I bet it can) to gauge student familiarity and access with a variety of technologies to better modify the class.

4) Being growingly accessible for both my online and F2F students with some form of online chat/IM system. I am leery of using a synchronous communication system for a required element of the class because it seems to me that one of the great advantages of online classes is to do the work when you want to and not according to a fixed schedule.

Reflections on week 2: Blackout

When teaching the first half of western civ, I always emphasize to my students that one of the advantages of living in monasteries was that they were largely self-sufficient and thus better able to endure, and even preserve a certain amount of literacy, during  the Germanic invasions.  well we are certainly a long way from there. It is always a sobering reminder of how dependent on technology in the modern world when most of it suddenly stops working, which is exactly what happened when San Diego County and some surrounding areas lost power last Thursday.

Not only was it harder to get around since most of the traffic lights were off, and almost impossible to buy things since stores’ electronic registers/computers were not working in order for them to check you out , but most importantly MiraCosta canceled my class.  O.K. it was only really the most important  impact only to me :P, and it was also understandable since no electricity -> no lights (on a growingly dark campus), no computers, no digital projectors, etc.; but it would have been nice to be able to hold class, if briefly, in a more old fashion way even if it was just to take roll and hand out the syllabus…

But what modern technology takes away it also gives back.  By using blackboard and email I was able to contact my students the following day to  let  them know the status of the class and also to encourage them to download the syllabus, get started with the reading and ask me questions, which I was able to answer over the rest of the week.  I think this is part of what Alec Couros  was going for when he was talking about how technology is changing the way our students, and we for that matter, learn and about how we need to embrace the “thinning of the classroom walls”.  Learning is less and less going to happen in the classroom, and with ever growing frequency happen in a variety of ways from a variety of sources.

In his presentation what struck a chord with me most was the email he received from a student about the pleasure of having their thoughts not only read but recognized and commented on not by a teacher (which they come to expect) but by a fellow student.  This makes me more than ever what to incorporate some level of peer grading to at least some of my online assignments (although I will probably use message boards and not a blog, but who knows at this point), so that they can see their work is not only  appreciated by me but their classmates.

I also appreciate the growing connectivity that he talked about.  After looking over some of the educational blogs Lisa had linked, and adding one to the already existing list that I receive, I found the one I like the most was a blog that was not on the list but that was linked to from one of the originals:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/

It is not where you start out but rather where you end up that really matters.

Who says you have to meet someone to teach someone

Well now that I have created a blog for myself I guess I will have to write on it. First let me introduce myself.  My name is Eric Gregory and I am an associate faulty member at MiraCosta in the history department (hey Lisa).  I have an M.A. from the University of Chicago and was in the Ph.D. program at UCLA but for the past 8 years I have been teaching at MiraCosta and a variety of other community colleges mostly in the San Diego area.  Now I have relocated to the Inland Empire (which while truly inland from the southern California coast, is not much of an empire), and I hope to cut down on my commuting one day.

While I am interested in moving into online teaching.  Like a number of you I have had some experience online, I have taught a number of hybrid classes and for the past 4 years I have supplemented my in person classes with optional online elements but the thought of teaching an entirely online class is somewhat disconcerting.  I am quite technologically savvy, I assembled the computer I am typing this post on, and probably the 5 to 6 computers I have used before it, so it is not the idea of using new software or modes of communication which is intimidating.  Rather it is the challenge of how to replicate, or more accurately provide something different but of comparable richness, the classroom environment in an online setting.

I must admit I have never really been much of a fan of blogs, it just seems to me that it is a growing part of a culture that seems to think that every notion/idea/experience needs to be documented and celebrated (sort of a text-based youtube).  But who knows maybe the POT will change my mind about blogs.  I can certainly see why in a limited environment it might be useful to document the progress that students make, whether they are students or professors. I look forward to meeting and learning with and from all of you.