Visualizing the Re-Designed Course
Our Course Re-Design seminar ended Thursday afternoon and the opportunity to think about the larger goals of my class and to collaborate with my peers over the past three weeks has been productive and insightful. My central goal was to bring eportfolio design into my literature class, which also should add another element of active learning to the semester, and while there are still some details to be worked out regarding the scaffolded assignments that will bring analysis and reflection to the eportfolio, I am at this point confident I can use this redesign this coming fall.
The eportfolio assignment as I’m imagining it now will start with the students divided into groups that I will pre-select and, I hope, arrange by compatible declared majors. Each group will select a larger theme, perhaps literature and the arts, literature and industry, literature and science, literature and economics, or the like, and then the individuals within the group will work on their separate eportfolios with their chosen texts, written analyses, reflection, and selected artifacts with the goal of linking their individual efforts together through their larger theme. Ideally, then, I can assemble all the groups’ efforts together through a class eportfolio dedicated to that semester. This is scaled back from what I had originally envisioned, but it still seems ambitious to me.
One of our final sessions in the seminar was to create a visual representation of how we saw our course redesign working. I’ve updated what I amateurishly drew on the board that day as a Venn diagram with an improved design to show how I hope all this will work in a concerted way. I see three basic areas of student involvement in the course. The first element, the assigned reading, of course, gets the priority in a literature course; regardless of anyone else’s effort, either the students’ or mine, the principle benefit for such a course is encountering the words and ideas directly. I am required to include tests, the second element, and here I include the exams as well as the graded and non-graded quizzes. The greater percentage of tested matter in these exams is in written responses to generally open-ended questions that will require not only familiarity with the texts and some disciplinary vocabulary, but also an ability to reason and apply, by logic and analogy, some independent thinking.
The third element, where the active learning is most obvious, I could describe as communication; I’ve brought together group discussions, voluntary office conferences, and potential email exchanges as examples of this element. As the diagram illustrates, then, the reading has a bearing on the tests and the discussions, the discussions have a bearing on the tests and on the interpretations of the readings, and the tests should incentivize and clarify the readings and the discussions, while also adding to the regular feedback students receive over the semester. In the center rests the eportfolio where the fruit of all this labor comes together in such a way as to provide context, purpose, direction, and personal relevance to each student’s work. And I will likely follow my peers’ suggestions to include the diagram in my class policy statement.
