A Long JourneyI have a deep history with 290. I was the Chair of the Curriculum Committee in 2015. We were tasked with choosing texts, creating learning outcomes, developing assignments, and creating a schedule for the semester. The course was first offered in Fall 2016. Its official title is "Intermediate Research and Writing." Each teacher of 290 chooses their own topic of inquiry. Mine is travel. I have taught it every Fall semester since its development. Only 4-5 sections are offered and I usually teach 3 of them. It's akin to an honors-level course since students must have earned credit for 101 through the AP exam and have SAT/ACT scores that qualify them to take Honors 118. It is probably too similar to 102 in that the same assignments are required, with some adjustments of course. It would be nice to revisit options for officially tweaking the course at some point. Offering it fully-online was never anticipated, so having to build a Canvas course from scratch presented some challenges especially since there was limited time to put it all together.
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Canvas Layout and Class Approach
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I endeavored to have a uniform appearance on most of the Canvas pages within the weekly Modules. I wanted to ensure that students would be comfortable with the layout and could find things easily. My other consideration was purely selfish. This uniformity also allowed for easier placement of the materials online. I mainly took my lecture notes, in-class activities, handouts, readings that I had neatly organized from previous semesters and placed them on Canvas with a few alterations and some explanations of materials. Some things that we did in class, I had them do as an exercise on their own. Anything that I would have explained in class, I provided in a list format, YouTube video, and document from my own stash. I made use of icons to guide students from one part to the next. I think it worked well given the time constraints.
But, even though I will be teaching it again fully-online for Fall 2021, I must admit that I don't think I'll change much at all in terms of organization and materials. The layout, info, pace, and outcomes all worked well and I received great comments on my TNVoice evaluations. I did have Zoom conferences every few weeks to check-in with students, answer questions, and address concerns. Since it is primarily a research class and students are choosing their individual topics under the umbrella of travel/transportation, everyone is searching in different databases, using different kinds of sources, approaching their topic from varying perspectives, and asking very different research questions. So, I didn't feel as if we needed those synchronous class meetings to go over the materials. On the whole, the students in 290 are very motivated, organized, come to the class already familiar with MLA and doing research, and have strong composition skills. Therefore, not much is needed to help them get interested in their projects and we don't need to spend extra time going over basic writing skills. Interestingly, I didn't see much difference, if any, in the comprehension of the materials or the quality of their work between the regular classroom and the online space. I'm not sure why that is since I've only just come to realize it, but I think it may be worth exploring. This is part of an analytical phase, not a descriptive process, so I am not elaborating further just yet. The peer editing workshops did not go so well online. Canvas isn't set up for the grading aspect of peer review, but is from the student perspective. It was relatively straight forward to set up the groups for peer review. And, once the students submitted their drafts, the work that they were supposed to comment on appeared directly to them in the assignment area. They could write their responses and the document would go back directly to the original student to view. Great. However, under each original student's peer review assignment was their original draft and the two responses back, not the original student's work on the other drafts. So, in order to grade each student's responses, I had to set up a new assignment area. That meant having students copy and paste their work into a second area in order to complete the assignment. I had detailed directions posted in Canvas, and there weren't too many issues, but it overly complicated the process that was very easy and productive in the classroom.
I also don't think the students wrote much valuable feedback about the drafts to their peers. There were general comments, some bullet points, and no sentence level help. In the classroom, students would handwrite comments on hard copies and could conference with each other to go over points at the end of the session. It was a much less interactive, productive, and valuable exercise through Canvas. I don't think that I will do peer reviews through Canvas again. It may work to have students visit the Writing Center instead for that sort of help, although I do suggest they do that on their own anyway. If Canvas switched the way that the review comments appeared in the gradebook, I would use it. But, for now, I'm afraid it just doesn't work smoothly enough and offer students enough bang for their buck. |
Brochure Final |
Since 290 is very similar to 102 with the assignments, the Curriculum Committee wanted to make it a little different by assigning a tri-fold brochure as the final project instead of a poster. Many of the freshmen composition classes require a final poster project and we wanted something that would still be able to be shared, would be considered a public document, and could be a visual representation of their research. So, a brochure seemed fitting. It's actually very easy to create one and the students produce amazing documents! It ends up being a great skill to develop. In the final project when we're able to be in the face-to-face classroom, the students would also give a presentation. So, by the end of this project, they would have presented their information in three diverse, yet related ways: 1. a written, formal paper, 2. a visual supplement, and 3. an oral presentation. Unfortunately, Zoom is not conducive to doing oral presentations on visual brochures with 20 students in the class. So, I had to eliminate the oral-presentation part of the project.
Now that I am more familiar with other online tools for creating visual materials such as Adobe Spark, Weebly, Tiki-Toki, and StoryMaps, among others, I might switch to these options instead of assigning the brochure, which seems like a bit of an outdated document in today's technologically-driven world. I think if the students could say they had experience using these in a job interview, or if they could use them for a future class project, it would be more impressive than the tri-fold brochure. But, this would also be bringing it a little closer to 102, as well, even though the interactive project is just for the Archival Unit, and not for the Qualitative Unit in 290. Is that enough of a difference? Should I make the switch? Jury is still out. |