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last.updated 6.8.10

 

Choosing Media


Purpose

After you have articulated the outcomes for your course, you may, if given the choice, need to decide how your course will be mediated. With so many media options, you will have to decide which ones are most suitable to help you fulfill your course goals with the target student audience. Today we will discuss and develop strategies for making these decisions.


Discussion–Choosing media for teaching writing from a distance?

We will discuss the following questions:

  • What questions do you have about the readings?
  • Based upon the readings what are some heuristics that you would develop for choosing the media for a distance education course?
  • What are the trials and tribulations of open-source and open-content software?
  • What are some strategies for choosing software programs that are learner-centered and do not privilege the instructors' expertise?

Freewrite–??? 3.0

If you could create the ideal program to mediate your distance education writing class (from FYW to any disciplinary course), what would it do? As you think about this, consider the readings, your experiences with various types of media and software programs, but most importantly what you need to accomplish in your courses. Therefore, you should think about what is currently available and then think two or three iterations down the line (no home teleportation units–a la Star Trek–that get all of the students to the same f2f location).

Class Activity–Designing a Course & Its Media

We will continue to represent the committee the English Department that has put together to design a required general education sophomore-level WI Introduction to Literature course (too many cooks stirring the pot?). We will draw upon our collective ideas and agendas to negotiate the different ideas that everybody has for designing this writing course. The committee chair will be taking notes in Google Docs so that other members can follow along.

After we put together the course, we will talk about the ideal software program we will develop to mediate it.