Gosh...It Works

Another red letter day for active learning in my composition class this morning. Frankly I wasn’t sure what to expect as we’re in that part of the semester in a first-year composition class when most of the preparatory ground that needs to be covered has been covered and the work just needs to be done. And as we used last Wednesday to create our Canvas eportfolio shells and worked with them some, I thought we would use today as a follow-up workshop. I wrote and distributed a checklist for starting their eportfolios and asked that they either work on their eportfolio development, their revisions of previous texts for uploading onto their eportfolio pages, or drafting their analysis paper.

Once again, my students exceeded my expectations. Some worked on their current drafts and some worked on their eportfolio design, and together they and I were learning how to get things done within the limitations of the Canvas learning management system. While I did my fair share of text revision and web design advising, they were doing their fair share of advising both me and each other in just the way one would want a collaborative work space to function.

What was particularly rewarding for me was to see a hypothetical proven. I had assumed that transferring text assignments into eportfolio (with the provision that they be modified in way to reflect their new online environment) would involve the students attending to my comments and suggestions on their graded work, and, in fact, this was exactly what I saw today in several cases. Then, before class ended, several students asked that we have a peer interview session on their current writing assignment as we did with their previous ones, which, of course, was fine with me and we scheduled this for our next class, and so they are, to a limited extent, participating in the design of their own course.