Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Courseblogging: Course Blog

One week from now, this online course will be behind me. Which is good, because then I can sleep!

I have to say that my students really stepped up. The online discussions, conducted in blog format, have been particularly successful, in my opinion. I start with an overall theme, pretty general -- for example, "culture and evolution," and give them a few resources to start from. I've used radio podcasts, websites, YouTube, TED talks, and blog posts (secretly exposing them to The Internets Beyond Google). They need to summarize and respond to the posted resources (at least 2 posts), and to each other. As the course has progressed, the students have increasingly engaged each other in discussion, including posting their own internet resources. Some of what has been posted has been fantastic, and I'll be using myself next semester. Periodically, the discussion gets off track, or someone draws an incorrect conclusion from the material, and I'll hop in to push things back on track.

I may well try integrating a similar discussion blog into my real-world classes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's great, Digger!

I like to have an online discussion component for some of the on-campus courses, too. I haven't integrated it into them all, but I did in two last year and it was awesome.

Plus, I didn't have to assign response papers on quizzes because they were doing the discussions online. And they were so interesting to read! :)

Congrats on almost being done....woohoo!

Anonymous said...

response papers OR quizzes