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last.updated 6.17.12

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.

Group Brainstorming–Questions to Teach By

Using either Google Docs, Google+ Hangout, or Adobe Connect (You will need to get some help from the instructor), you and your group will meet for twenty minutes to develop a list of heuristics you would give to a new instructor (or administrator) of online writing instruction to help choose the media they will use for the class.

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?
• Which media did you choose for your group brainstorming? Why? Which media do you think your students would choose for a similar activity? Why?

Freewrite I–??? 3.0

Take ten minutes to write about the following scenario. 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 efficiently get all of the students to the same f2f location).

Class Discussion–Bring the Future to Us

Each individual will have two minutes to pitch their ideas to the class. Then we will discuss...

• which ideas are the best and why (reality TV style)
• how we might go about creating each chosen idea
• the current technologies that we could use to acheive these goals