The last month has been an adventure. The course site went live on August 28, and we've been up to our necks in students, emails and grading every sense. I think it is going well, except that is it WAY too much work and we need to figure out how to either do less or work more efficiently. The in-class videos and the media distributed on ELMS have been popular with the students, but at first took about four times as long to ;produce and publish as they should; we seem to have solved that problem. We are using a new grading rubric for journals that gives more feedback, but at a tremendous cost of time, especially to the one GA who has three sections.

What's working really well:

The "talk show" format, when we do it. Colleagues Mary Sies and Henrike Lehgnuth joined us to talk about the nature of American Studies, and it was a good conversation, complete with audience participation. (Note to self: move chairs closer together.)

The student-produced text. Imagine a textbook of 145 self-reflective essays, written by the current students in the class and available free and online. Imagine that they can (and will) be revised throughout the semester. Yes, it's really that cool.

Welcome to AMST 201 -- Introduction to American Studies!

Many of you are probably wondering how and when class will begin, given that for some of you, the course is completely online and for the face-to-face sections, the first lecture comes after the first discussion. Here's the information you need:

All sections will be using a single ELMS course site. Log in to http://www.elms.umd.edu using your directory ID and password -- no earlier than August 29, or we won't be home!

Discussion groups (all sections) begin online August 29 . Look under Course Modules on that date for instructions.

Traditional classroom discussions will also meet on August 30.

The first lecture meeting will be Tuesday, Sept. 4. That may also be the last time we refer to it as a "lecture", since it is more like a talk show format multiple guests, with minimal lecturing by me.

A few other answers to frequently-asked questions:

1) if you are getting this in response to an email you sent me after August 22, you missed the original email. This means that the email I used (the one attached to your student account) isn't working, or you don't check it anymore. This is a Bad Thing, and you should fix it.

2) If you have trouble logging in to ELMS, contact the OIT Helpdesk. (301-405-1400).

3) There is no textbook to purchase. Everything you need will be online or distributed in class.

Second Life section?

Here's an idea for Spring 2008: make the 25-person online section a Second Life section, with Blackboard supporting some functions. But that way some of the interviews could be in SC. More later...

Course Design Paradigm Shift

I have experienced a real paradigm shift in the process of this course redesign. When I first began teaching, everything began with the syllabus -- what material we needed to cover, in what order. Then came the design and scheduling of the assessments (exams and papers). This time, I began with the course learning outcomes, which are based on the university-wide learning outcomes for general education courses in the humanities. Then, with a writing specialist, I've been developing the assessments and grading rubrics to match the outcomes. For the last seven or eight months, I have been gathering resources and ideas for possible content units.

Now, three weeks from the start of classes, I am designing individual units, beginning with the first two weeks of the semester and the very last week. "Designing" a unit means identifying the theme for the week, identifying which resources that be used by students before the lecture, and which will go into the lecture (or Core Content Module, for the online students who will not attend the lecture) and sketching out the follow-up activities (individual reflection/response or group discussion). All of these pieces need be documented on lesson plans and added to our Blackboard site.

For most of the units, I still do not have an actual date when they will be scheduled; that will happen about a week before classes begin, when the GTA's and I finalize the syllabus calendar. About a third of the dates (those toward the end of the semester) will be listed as "To Be Determined", to allow for incorporation of emerging issues or special events.

I told a friend last week that this was the scariest teaching experience in my entire career. There is no plan B, where I just step to the lecture and talk for 75 minutes. It will either work or it won't. Yikes.

Team Building in Progress!

With about six weeks to go until our first class, the AMST 201 teaching/production team is taking shape. Graduate Assistants Christine and Kristen are on board, and I have two undergraduate students at work on finding and developing media. I found out that the university has just signed an agreement to have a presence on iTunes iUniversity, which solves the problem of locating server space for the podcasts and downloads. There's a chance we may also be able to broadcast/webcast some classes with the cooperation of UMTV. The writing rubrics are at the review stage, and coming along nicely.

Beyond that, I am using a lesson plan template to plot of the content for the first 2/3 of the course , leaving the rest for serendipity, current events and idiosyncrasy.

Last year, all the coordinated sections of AMST 201 used a common text (an edited reader) and a monograph selected by the instructor. The reader (American Identities) was OK, but I felt that sometimes it required a bit of stretching a unit to use selections from the book. This coming year we will be using a combination of electronic reserves, online materials and field assignments instead of a purchased printed materials (textbooks or course packet). These offer several advantages, the most important being:

1) Non-printed materials are more cost-effective. The price of books and course packets have increased dramatically over the years, and course packets can not be returned, even during the drop/add period.
2) Digitized text materials are more accessible for students with reading/learning disabilities who use adaptive technology such as screen reading software.
3) Using digital materials and field experiences gives the instructors the flexibility to change “readings” in response to current events without shortchanging students who have invested in a text or course pack.

A list of the materials for these sections will be posted online. Instructors and students in all AMST 201 courses are welcome to use and contribute to the list.

Re: section vs. discussion

Chirag wrote:

AMST 201 is scheduled for Tu-Th this fall. What is the difference between section (lecture) and discussion? You want to design 13 sections. I assume that means one section a week, right? What is the format of the discussions?

The 010* sections will share a teaching team -- myself, two graduate teaching assistants, and perhaps some undergraduate TA's. The Tuesday 11-12:30 session (lecture) is the multimedia "talk show", with guests, media clips, performances, and the like. I am hoping to be able to distribute it online (probably in smaller clips, rather than a 90-minute podcast, which sounds deadly) for the 0105 section. The other four sections will also have a discussion section, either face-to-face or online lead by one of the GTA's.

I see the discussions as both a follow up to whatever happens in the Tuesday session and as a planning, "input" session for upcoming lectures. Since these are smaller groups (25 students), they will be more interactive than the Tuesday session. Activities in the discussion may be full-group or small-group discussion of the material covered on Tuesday, a peer editing workshop, team-based development of materials for future Tuesday sessions or student presentations.