Monthly Archives: June 2016

From Crisis to Opportunity: Yu Li’s Reflection on M4

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This week’s readings resulted in a shift of mentality for me and led me to make two major changes to the course/syllabus.

The first is to make it one of the course objectives for students “to exercise and increase autonomy in pursuing self-determined learning in the online environment” (quoted from the revised syllabus). As you have probably heard me saying, I have been struggling with formulating measurable outcomes to include in the syllabus. After reading up on assessment and learning outcomes and watching the JIT video, I do have a better understanding of how to do this – the ABCD method is especially helpful in a concrete way – and can imagine writing a long list of very specific outcomes for each lesson of the course. I have decided, however, not to do that; instead, I will have students reflect on their own learning outcomes throughout the course as a way to cultivate their ability to pursue self-determined learning. More specifically, they will write three reflections, two at the beginning of the course and one anytime before the course ends, to respond to questions that require them to articulate their learning outcomes and examine the effectiveness of their personal learning approach based on their experiences during the previous week. They will post these reflections for their peers to comment on. I will set aside time in the synchronous session to highlight the main themes and discuss them with the students. By doing this, my hope is that students would become more aware of the learning process and will be more willing and able to take charge of pursuing their own learning goals. Do you think this would work, to a certain degree?

A second change I’ve been thinking about as a result of this week’s reading is to make it a “flipped” class. I originally had the idea that synchronous sessions should be devoted mostly to lecturers and organized discussions. Now I wonder – now that students are expected to be more autonomous, if I should enable them to learn on their own before the synchronous sessions via prerecorded VoiceThread lectures, and then when we meet, I will give them questions and tasks to work on. This idea also made me wonder if I should change the format of the course to meeting once a week for 3 hours, so that we would have more time to work together. For this I would need to do more thinking. Maybe this can be addressed as part of the course design assignment.

In any case, I feel that this week’s reading got me to see the challenges posed by the online environment more as an opportunity than a crisis. It was quite inspiring to read about heutagogy, or self-determined learning, and how its approach could be particularly suitable in the e-learning context. The syllabus or course design is still work in progress for me, as I may also adopt assignments that require learner-generated content and learner-defined assessment, but I haven’t quite figured out what to do on those yet.

M4 (Don) Emulation is the Mother of Invention or: What the Medievals can us about “heautagogy.”

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This week’s readings have been challenging, voluminous, and mostly quite worthwhile. The truth is that calling this a class in online teaching is a misnomer, because it has turned into a very provocative class on teaching, period. I wish I had encountered some of this material earlier, not necessarily because I would teach any differently today, but because I would have made more intentional decisions about assessment, design and instructional method. The two most important takeaways I have from this week are that “assessment drives learning,” (when I repeated this to my wife, who works in the field of primary education, her response was something like “duh,” though it seemed really cutting edge to me) and that we are learning strategies we can use in all our classes, not just the online ones. So thanks Leah, and thanks to all of you.

That said, I do not think Marshall is being merely cantankerous when he asks (it is a beautiful question) “can a self teach itself something it does not already know?” This is of course a real philosophical question whose answer I do not take for granted. I tried thinking about “heautagogy” in terms of my own teaching/learning practice and realized two things. The first is that of course the best learning is self-driven and self-motivated. That is what I spend most of my own time doing when I have the option (currently I am engaged in a crash course on the medieval sociologist Ibn Khaldun), and it is certainly a goal of my pedagogy (sorry, I use that term in the old fashioned way) in the sense that i want students to become independent learners and ultimately to be independent of me (certainly on the doctoral level).  But this is not always a realistic objective, in my view, and even when it is, it requires a lot more careful thinking about issues of authority, habituation and graduated aptitudes of learners than I found in the assigned reading.

For the past few years I have been collecting notes for an eventual article on the medieval philosopher/rabbi Moses Maimonides’ theory of education, which is indebted not just to the classical rabbinic tradition but to Aristotle, Plato and Arabic writers like Alfarabi and Ibn Rushd. Without going into too much detail here, the fundamental problem facing all of these thinkers is the need to modulate learning through habituation, which is by nature a conservative, socially reproductive process grounded in authority, and the development of critical faculties that can overturn accepted norms, generate new insights and even generate new habituative regimes.

One of the reasons I find the medieval discussion (Maimonides is not alone here) so much more illuminating than some of the contemporary material is that rather than portray the need for fully independent, student driven learning as some sort of new discovery that needs to replace existing modes (wow, we even have a cool new word for it!) they understood that there is no escape. Beings such as ourselves will continue to need habituation even once we become independent learners, though some of that habituation can be self-directed.

There is a life-course dimension to this that is very relevant to modern higher education. For the medievals, one begins life subject to the authority of parents and teachers, whose responsibility it is to ensure habituation to appropriate norms that will not only allow for good citizenship but also make room for future learning! At some point this shades into a learner’s desire to emulate those who s/he respects, including their scholarly persona. One studies and thinks under a tutor and begins to internalize values, take responsibility for them, even decide what kinds of further habituation one needs  as an individual . To take just one example, a person whose self-evaluation in light of advanced learning leads them to understand that they have departed from the mean (by being miserly, for example) takes upon themselves to distribute charity in a deliberate and graduate way until that trait becomes second nature to them. If they come to understand that some aspect of their society is corrupt they may need to opt for revolutionary change, but even in so doing they must also realize that they will have no choice but to create new habituative practices if they seek to establish any kind of a stable way of life or platform for ongoing learning.

My own tendency in college teaching has been to assume too much independent motivation and skill among students at various stages. To give one example, a favorite assignment of mine (which I learned from my own advisor) is to ask one student each week to come to class with a precis of that week’s readings and to lead the first part of class discussion based on their own questions or critical observations. The few times I tried this with Emory undergraduates, it was an abject failure and I dropped it. Students did not yet, in my estimation, have the critical skills needed to carry out the activity successfully and other students were (in my view justifiably) annoyed that they had to spend their class time on this rather than hear from me–which does not just mean receiving a lecture but engaging in a structured conversation.

Now, I could have made this assignment work better if I had been willing or able to spend much more time on it–working with the individual students before class, making sure that their precis were always distributed in advance , and if I devoted a fair amount of class time to teaching those particular skills. But given the economy of my own time, that was energy I needed to spend on research and writing; the students were not clamoring for more independence; and the honest truth is that it is I think it is OK for undergraduates to rely more heavily on the instructor, particularly as they are experimenting in a variety of fields. They need to develop the habits that can allow them to be more independent and that occurs over time and over many classes– I did not view it as essential to make the delivery of content secondary to that goal. It actually feels like my responsibility to make sure a certain amount and kind of content is covered in the course, and that is something I do not want to disparage.

I expect more of course of graduate students, but here too I have found that more independent learning simply takes much more instructional time and energy. First year doctoral students are not the same as advanced doctoral students, etc.

My point is not that we should not strive– the various assessment techniques we are discussing can help us to set an appropriate level. But we need to accept that habituation, emulation and authority are not enemies of independent learning but segues to it; that students need to be met where they are at rather than where we imagine them and that we also need to have realistic expectations of ourselves and where our time can be spent given the assessment regime to which WE are numbingly subject.

ALL THE BEST!!!

 

M4-Duke–Can a self teach itself something it does not know?

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I have long been troubled by the notion of being self-taught which is expressed  in terms like autodidacticism and, more recently,  heutagogy (which was new to me and I never would have or could have taught it to myself, wherein lies essence of one of my concerns about heutagogy, itself.)  While I can’t retrieve the source from memory, I recall hearing a critic of self taught artists being quoted as saying, “Self-taught painters learn to paint from a person who does not know how to paint.”  This represents for me a quiet, gnawing worry that we have come to believe that self-determination of learning is a good thing–an apotheosis of a dimension that begins with pedagogy (teaching children) and passes through androgogy (adult learning which is less passive and more autodidactic) on the way to the ultimate goal of self-determination in heutagogy.  My worry here is this: if learners are to learn what they  must in order to deal with the exigencies and vicissitudes of life, even if these cannot be anticipated with specificity, there must be someone who has already learned something about doing this who can guide them in developing the capability to do so.  Had Leah not provided us with a reading on heutagogy, it would have remained far off my radar for..well..forever.  Yet, now that she has directed us toward it, we can think about it and decide, as in my case, that I am not so comfy with it!

So what is my sense of learner self-determination in my online course?  I am very much OK with directing students to topics that I feel they must master and having them teach themselves in any way or at any pace they choose so long as they fulfill the assessment rubrics that I develop for them.  I am not OK with their deciding what is important or not for them to know.  There will, I believe, always be a need for someone to be, at minimum, a “guide on the side” but a guide there must be.  As I think about how the notions of self-directed learning can be blended with traditional F2F classes, I do see great potential.  As I consider things now with admittedly a small amount of online knowledge and experience, I can see how my own way of thinking about education can be reconciled with modern approaches to distance learning.

I have always felt that the good teacher does not have to know what he or she knows in order to teach, but the good teacher must know what students know or do not know.  This allows for the overlay of an invisible rubric over the entire class (as well as individuals in it ) which represents where the learners are at the beginning and where the teacher hopes they will be at the end.  All of the activities in the course are then directed at transporting learners  (in rubric-ese) from level 1 achievement to level 4.

In my online course, I believe I will still need to get a sense of where the students are at the start and I will want to define clearly for them where they need to be at the end (course goals).   I will also want to include formative and summative assessments so I can monitor and evaluate their progress.  However, the BIG difference is that I will be widening the range of ways in which they travel to the goals which I as the teacher (ped-agogically) have set. If they wish to heutagogically travel outside of the content set forth and explore ideas in a more self-determined way, I am sure that they will gain much from their experience.  In fact, I will want to encourage and reward in some way such “expeditions.”

 

What would a blended course in abnormal psychology look like?  At this point, I feel that it would need to be text-book based since there is much to learn in terms of history, language, theory, and modes of treatment.  While many students will just be “stopping in” for the semester, others will ultimately become professionals whose goal it will be to help people.  There are  many things that these people who may become clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers simply must know!  There is no place for pure heutagogy or self-determination here.   A self-taught potter’s off-round, leaking coffee cup might be cute in its own primitive way, but would any of us agree to a procedure performed by a “self-taught” cardiovascular surgeon?  I use hyperbole here to heighten the contrast, but at a less extreme level, I think what I am saying is that within each online course, there needs to be a all three sorts of learning–pedagogic, androgogic and heutogogic.  The traditional classroom, admittedly,  leans much too heavily on the first of these and, I believe, creates students who are passive and does not help them grow confident in their own capabilities.  The heutagogic extreme, while good for some, would create highly confident people who are dangerously unaware of what they don’t know. (Is there a presidential candidate out there who might fit this description?)  The balance among all three would seem to me an ideal place to aim for in online learning.

From the assessment perspective, I will need to include rubrics and assessment methods that address all three modes of learning.  Traditional quizzes and exams will help with the specific content that I consider critical to know.  This is early in Bloom’s hierarchy.  I would also want to provide assignments that would require application and integration such as studying case histories or looking at and analyzing films or literary works.  This would also afford opportunities for writing which we know is the one major activity that makes people smarter overall.   Finally, I would add an assignment which would be the greatest challenge and which would require autodidacticism and, yes, heutagogic behavior.  This would be a project in which, individually or as teams, students attempt to create an entirely new method of classifying abnormal behavior,  This is possible because, as a discipline, we are still not sure whether our current approach is adequate.  This is reflected in the continuing revisions of our diagnostic system (six since 1952) and in a recent decision by insurance companies to move away from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic system and move toward use of the ICD-10, which is an international classification system for various diseases and disorders.  (I know that most of my class-mates may not be familiar with all this and I apologize for placing it here, but we are all androgogic!)

M4–FIrst Impressions (only) from Michael

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(Baby steps, Michael–micro-movements! Calm down.)

I took approximately forever getting my syllabus draft posted, and am scrambling today to catch up with the M4 readings, so I have only initial impressions to share.

One issue I keep coming back to is that many of the ideas and tools (conceptual and technological) we are gaining here may be differently useful in different courses. I keep encountering ideas that I’d like to keep in mind for revising other courses. (Really hoping I can discipline myself not to lose these intuitions in the onrush of regular-school-year responsibilities, but to keep studying and trying adjustments and innovations across my teaching–as they suit. Fragile idealism.)

For now, though, I’ve chosen a course that I find stubbornly resistant to some of the vision being shared here: I won’t detail it too much, but it’s a very teacher-centered course, simply because I’m trying to do two very unusual things in the field–integrating Western and non-Western literatures at each step and linking literature to history through the practices of materialist mentality history (okay, that one’s less rare, and yes, I went to grad school in the eighties, what’s it to ya?) [wink]. Neither approach is self-evident; I need to do a lot of the initial spadework for the students. I do try to be transparent about my methods, and will gladly use the online format to engage them in miniature instances and problems so they can at least get a feel for these analytic techniques–but only up to a point.

I feel I can’t expect students to spend the whole semester generating new knowledge according to my preferred analytic methods, working upward from the primary and even secondary data without slowing down the course to the point that it’s not fulfilling its purpose as a survey. This is where I split off from the skill-centered focus we’re reading about–I get it, I do, but this course resists the shift because of the requirements of coverage: I still need to race them through the Louvre, as we in the survey-course biz say.

So I’m trying to be patient and to believe that more of this will be applicable over a larger shift in all my teaching.

To that end, I think I’ll always keep Bloom’s taxonomy to hand–it’s an old reliable for me (although I hadn’t encountered his work in the affective domain, which I need to think about NOW.)

The two articles offered as “Primers” in Assessment both held my attention and seem useful as introductions to larger questions; I do wonder how much they are addressed to public-school instruction as well as upper level, and keep imagining a subtextual dialogue with standardized testing here. I found my mind shifting, in the Sewell, Frith, and Colvin article, to larger departmental learning assessment goals and the dialogue of my courses with them–so I want to go back and take those thoughts further.

The other articles seem to be for me to keep and apply as I approach other courses, although the article on student self-assessment read to me as a nudge to keep my grading standards crystal-clear (is that the same as transparent?)

M4_María: Feeling Learning for Real

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I learned a number of new things from the Assessment readings for our M4. Firstly, I thought about self- assessment, an idea I have worked into some of my courses in an attempt to foster student agency in the learning process. For instance, when I was phasing out the weekly papers as the enrollment numbers swelled in my classes, I tried having them write the paper for the last day of class every week; we then rotated each paper, so every one of them read everyone else’s, added comments, and assigned a mark of check, check minus, or check plus. Including their own. That way they were able to assign themselves a ‘grade’ without contemplating the “what if the professor does not agree with my self-assigned grade?” Students benefitted from this exercise, but I deleted it when I dropped the WR tag from my courses and I got more and more students. I am considering that perhaps a version of this with the VT contributions may be a possibility.

Although I am not completely in the heutagogical realm (as a lifelong learner of foreign languages, including English, I give every new word a kind of moratorium until I feel comfortable using it), I appreciated tremendously both the concept of learning-centered assessment and the life-long learning. I have always set a very high standard for my courses by desiring that students enrolling in them do NOT learn for a test, or for a pretty conversation in a board room (where they prove they can say gazpacho and mean it, too), but by aiming for a long shot grasp of every concept they entertain. I seek for students to know the difference between mise en scene and mise en abyme, between something “absurd” and the Theater of the Absurd, between dress and costume, or between traveling and zoom, not merely to prove to me in a test that they know, and immediately proceed to forget it and about it, to toss it as soon as they delete that seminar file in their computers and throw away their papers.  I want them to know, deep down, that their lives have many a mise en scene moment (when they gesticulate and raise a voice to make a point, for instance) as well as mise en abyme moments (when they don’t know what to do with themselves after a depression bout, or the death of a loved one); that they engage dress every morning, but turn to costume for a party or an interview; that they don’t get the lack of logic of their mothers telling them to clean their rooms when they go back home for the holidays, but that they’ll never forget Artaud and La orgástula. And that if their own optical and mental cameras can travel, zoom, and establish great raccord in the movies they are developing in their lives, perhaps there’s hope for a richer poorer world.

Now, how to have this all work in a learning-centered assessment world? First of all, I no longer give tests, and if I do, they focus on their own articulation of an interpretation, not on multiple choice. Even when they are asked by me to show they are familiarizing themselves with facts in their daily discussion, reviews, reaction papers/chats/videos and the final performance project (using elements of vocabulary, grammar, audiovisual elements, languages, and performative expression learned through the semester), I take into account, and I tell them this beforehand, their voice, their take on things, their individual reading of performative pieces. Some students agonize over this, because they are still not ready to let go of their high school models, when they were told what to do; to those, I underscore that I do not accept them to come to my office asking “what do you want me to do/say/write/think?” They are to come to my office to ask questions, to test theories, to engage discussion about these facts they are learning, and then go home and read and write more on them.  Not the easiest pedagogy, especially when standardization and inside-the-box-thinking are so overrated, but in the end, at least for some students, it works really well. I’ll keep searching for more sources about this.

M4_Reyes: Tackling Assessment

Week 4 Discussion

Pharmacology is an intensive course in that we cover a large amount of material within 8 weeks.  We do block scheduling meaning that the students do 4 weeks of didactic, 4 weeks of clinical and then repeat it, so that 16 weeks of material is covered in 8 weeks.  We have a large variety of students, from neonatal to geriatric and have to be generic enough with the content to be relevant to everyone.  Some schools teach pharmacology from a pharmacotherapeutics angle meaning that they teach prescribing issues whereas we teach it from a more pharmacology perspective, so really focusing on mechanisms of action.  One issue has been misconceptions about the goal of the course.

In the past, the class consisted of 2 exams, a midterm and final and they were open book with some case studies in class.  The grades were terrible and students did not review the online material that was available, we could access the stats from ECHO 360.  This past year, we did a mix of in class lectures with case studies and also Adobe Connect sessions.  We awarded participation points for attending class using in class quizzes that covered the reading.  We also added 4 online quizzes and kept the two exams, that were proctored in class and were close book.  The grades drastically improved and they seemed to have a better grasp of the content.  I would consider this a current strength.

This year, the class is being offered totally online.  So in terms of assessments, I think we are going to keep the format of the quizzes and exams. In terms of growth/improvement, I have developed a study guide that outlines the specific learning objectives per module, we are identifying a prototype drug for each class and a sample test question is included for each drug class.  For the lectures, I like the idea of using Zaption with embedded questions and have heard that it integrates with Canvas.  For case studies, I think using something like VoiceThread might make sense for each specialty.  Presenting a case on heart failure and having them work in groups to explain how they might approach the case from their particular perspective would make the material more relevant.  Since the objectives for each module are more clearly stated, we are going to develop a standard for the presentations.  Maybe starting with a case study, working through the material and then wrapping up the case study.  Also, trying to develop higher order questions to ensure mastery of the material.

Michael’s Midway-into-M3 Primal Scream

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Okay, I’m not going to scream. (It was just an attention-getting headline.) But, having read M2’s material about learner-based syllabi, and now, in M3, the initial overview of Instruction Design Models, and the OLC Five-Pillar Quality Framework material, I have to remark:

No teacher talks like this.

These are not terms teachers use, at least none I’ve ever conversed with.  (It’s a matter of both vocabulary–Content assets? Storyboarding? Domain specific referenced items? Post-assessment items?–and more.)

There’s always the possibility–I think this is the faith we’re riding on at this point in our course–that these are terms we’ve actually always needed, and that here’s our chance for paradigm-shifting enlightenment about something we’ve all been doing for years. Or that these terms correspond to things we’ve always done. It’s also possible that some disciplines are closer to these ways of thinking than others.

But for me, it’s a mysterious view. And as a historian, I always argue that it’s important to listen to the accounts and points of view of the people your research represents: concrete, on-the-ground experience contributes meaning and insight that you can’t get any other way. And as one who’s been in the thick of teaching for a generation now, I can’t believe these people have ever taught or listened openly to a teacher, at least to a teacher like me;  I find these thoughts–to put it as neutrally as possible–unfamiliar, somehow off-base, and therefore something less than organically connected to what I’m trying to do. Doesn’t mean I’m not willing to try, but–isn’t it important that no teacher talks this way?

Beneath it all–this is beyond the question of jargon–what I sense is a businesslike conflation of broad, undergraduate liberal-arts education and inquiry with focused, practical, and measurable workplace skill-training; there is, deep in the assumptions here, a reduction of teaching to the transfer of testable information, combined with a bias toward “application to real-world problems”–and I’m teaching literature. There are certainly elements of information, comprehension, and analysis in what I teach, but–crucially, I think–a lot of the value of what I do isn’t that easily reducible:  I need to share an element of appreciation, of evoking pleasure and affect from the text, of  inviting enthusiasm and interpretive imagination, of modeling a life of reading and perceiving and enjoying to my students (which may affect them more than any specific text they read). These are easier to do face-to-face. Online, I’m pondering how to preserve that part of my work. (And, by the way,  my teaching has elements of “faculty satisfaction” these guys have never heard of.)

At this point, I’m not embarrassed to defend these sorts of intangibles–the feel central to me. What do you think–am I just being sentimental?

 

Zhiyun’s reflection on M2

Week 2 Discussion

I am very excited about this online course; it has increased my curiosity and enthusiasm for the teaching of statistics online. Although I am now looking forward to going further with this, I must confess that at the beginning when I saw 20-page syllabus, the amount of reading, and various technologies and tools which I had never seen before, I felt overwhelmed. At the beginning it was a bit intimidating.

During these two weeks of online course learning, I read and digested our syllabus. I realized this syllabus was extremely complete and detailed. It included a course overview and outcomes, communication methods and expectations, and detailed weekly modules. Each module was tailored to acclimate us to how to teach online, how to engage students in the class and motivate students to communicate with peers, how to design team activities, and how to write online course syllabi and design courses. All of this will be very useful for us in the near future, and I think this syllabus itself is a great exemplar of an online course syllabus.

 Additionally, this course exposed me to many new technologies. Among these new technologies are voicethread, online adobe connect live, diigo, and scholarblog, and I am still getting familiar with them and learning how to use them proficiently and effectively. At the same time, I am also thinking about how to apply them to my statistical online courses. What else do I need for an online course in statistics? I am still on my quest to discover the tools and master them…..

Are we there yet? Are we THERE YET!!? Don’s Reflection on Module 2

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You know those commercials with the attractive executive sitting on a beach somewhere with her smart phone  and a big umbrella-drink, taking business  calls while pretending to be at the office? I think somewhere in the back of my mind that is how I expected this summer’s  online learning to proceed.

I mean, I am always interested in improving my pedagogy, but an eight week course? Over the summer? I could be writing another article or learning Arabic or just spending time with my family. Yet, here I am in a minivan packed to the gills with four young kids on a three day road trip trying to focus on responding to scholar blogs while someone is throwing popcorn all over the place, someone else is yelling about getting hit in the head with popcorn, and the effort of reading while my wife drives is making me carsick anyway.

But enough about me. I think my point is that aside from whatever pedagogical goals we may have, I would guess that I am not entirely alone is thinking that a primary motivation is the need to supplement my relatively meager salary and participate in the illusion of freedom that always seems to accompany new technologies before we realize how much our lives need to change in order to accommodate and maintain them.

Freedom is the real promise of online learning, for both students and instructors, and I would rather not hide that behind some grandiose vision of how much better our learning outcomes will be. Maybe they will, but at the end of the day, some student who needs to hold down a job over the summer will be able to take this course in a way that wouldn’t be as feasible if they had to spend the day going back and forth to Emory campus; just as I may be able to go away with my family or get some research done off campus while still hopefully making ends meet. I would be interested to know how online learning is being used in more lucrative academic professions like law or medicine where the impulse to find ways to double task is not so pressing.

For me, at any rate, this initial introduction has shown me that in order to do this well I won’t be sitting on a beach someplace because this kind of teaching takes real work and focus–maybe more than traditional teaching, or maybe that will diminish as my learning curve hits plateau.

Ideally, I would like my online teaching to enhance students’ sense of themselves as participants in the educational process and not just consumers–people who can be involved in the production of knowledge themselves. But I’ll settle for a little additional freedom, if I can master the technology, because that’s really the truth of why I am here.

 

 

Small Wish, Big Challenge: Yu Li’s Reflection on M2

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What motivates me to take on this project is my imagined ability to add more colors, flavors, dimensions… to a course I have been teaching increasingly off of canonical print materials over the years. When I developed the course – Chinese Writing Systems in Asia (Chinese, East Asian Studies, Linguistics 235) – in 2009, I did my homework. By that I mean I did extensive online research to find juicy supplementary materials, and archived them carefully on Blackboard for students to enjoy. They did, as sometimes these extra tidbits became conversation starters in the classroom. The problem was that I got lazy – and lazier – for subsequent iterations of the course, until when that Bb page finally stopped being copied over to the new course sites. I am not sure about the exact reason why that happened. Maybe I needed to do a better job integrating online materials in the class discussion of other readings. Maybe because I kept adding new print materials, which crowded out the online supplements. In any case, here I am, hoping that I would be able to revive the original cyber luster of the course by recreating it online. If I am clever enough, I may even be able to figure out effective and fun ways to engage the students in searching for and sharing materials that are particularly interesting to them. At least I am lucky in one respect – that is, the subject matter of the course lends itself really well to the online format. Much of the information is visual, and there are troves of websites, forums, and videos dedicated to the topic.

The biggest challenge in this endeavor, as I can imagine at this point, will be redesigning student tasks, activities, and assignments without compromising their learning outcomes. The current (traditional) course is already a very intensive one, perhaps having to do with the fact that I have been teaching it as a writing requirement course to its full capacity (19-23 students). For the online version, I would like to be able to maintain its rigor in writing training. Recognizing that the time span will be about 65% shorter than a regular semester, I will have to devise new assignments that students could reasonably complete within two or three days, for example, rather than two or three weeks, but will still enable them to progress and be ready to tackle a major writing project by the time the course ends. I’ve already started on some new ideas when working on a draft of the syllabus. Hopefully more will come and the syllabus will be ripe and ready in a couple of more weeks for my fellow troupers to review and critique. Stay tuned.