Course Design by Chad Harris

As I mentioned in the last post, I wanted to make the three components of Media and Society (Discussion sections, lecture, online modules) work together and reinforce each other more.

I did this by linking a significant, weekly online discussion board to the face-to-face sections.  I have been using a separate book for my sections called “Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Media and Society,” which was arranged as a series of pro and con debates.  I simply had students debate these issues by section online first, before they met face-to-face.  In the face-to-face sessions, the students had already been discussing the issues online, so I was interesting is seeing how the online sections reinforced the F2F sections.  Stay tuned for my 2nd Iteration learning story, where I will flesh out the results of that.

Mainly, however, I was pleased with the structure whereby online discussions reinforced F2F discussions.

My ability to manage all this depended on the TA’s which was an issue that I will discuss elsewhere.  Also, I was affected by my use of clickers during my 2nd iteration, which I will write about in a separate post.

Well, I am actually writing this at the end of my second iteration, my third semester as a 2007 pICT fellow, so I’ll first write a few words about what my overall project is, and how it’s changing.

First, the newly formed Journalism and Media Studies department is (or was, before the budget crisis) experimenting with blended course designs, mainly for practical purposes. Currently, media studies is a fairly popular major, with more students wanting courses than we can provide room for. So the solution has been to use a section design, where large lecture course like mine, Media and Society (JMS 408), are broken up into 8 or ten sections, managed by TA’s. Since we don’t have space for all the sections, we are implementing the blended course design so that every section actually meets face-to-face only once every other week. The weeks they don’t meet, we ideally have online course work, content, and learning activities designed. In this way, the lack of space to meet every week is substituted with significant online requirements, thus a “blended” course design.

Feel free to browse through the slides on my First Iteration Page to see how my first year went. I was mostly experimenting with different uses of Blackboard, mainly for online discussions, and I also had a set of Wiki pages that students did online at a site called Wikispaces.com, recommended to me by Jim Julius. I had roughly divided the course into three components: Lecture, Face-to-face discussion section, and the Online component consisting of discussion boards and the wiki spaces. The results are presented in my first iteration.

My main point here is that in the first year/iteration, I had trouble making the three components of the course work together – they tended to function more as three distinct components rather than components that reinforce each other in some productive way.

So my next goal was to find ways to integrate the different aspects of the “blended course,” and further implement some of the technological ideas I have been learning through pICT.

Stay tuned for more . . .

Chad Harris