I made a number of changes to the course during the Fall 2006 semester. The virtual gallery of ethnographic artworks was a central focus of the class as in previous semesters, but I altered the ways I prepared the students for the project. For example, I changed the way I formed the groups, I integrated former student-constructed web pages into my lectures, and I provided technical assistance for the gallery project. The lack of improvement in the quality of the web pages has raised questions for me about how to execute this project successfully in the future.
1. How can I better arrange teams and use them effectively as a teaching and learning tool?
Although virtually all of the students provided positive feedback about their website project experience, students still complained about the logistics of a team effort. They found it very difficult to coordinate their schedules. For students carrying a full load of classes this created considerable stress. Students also complained bitterly about the unevenness in terms of various students’ effort. The evaluation process, which was based on the team’s effort—not an individual’s effort—was consistently subject to resentment, and I have yet to find a perfect solution for this problem.
I believe team-based projects like the one I describe here can be meaningful learning tools and the results can be far greater than what can be accomplished by assigning individual research papers. However, I need to reexamine the process of forming groups and assessing individual participation within the group.
In the future, I will have students create the website material on wiki pages first, using Blackboard. This will eliminate time conflicts and allow me to see and evaluate students’ individual contributions. Once all materials are prepared in this manner, they can then easily be transferred to the webpage format.
2. How can I better scaffold to enable a high level of performance and keep students from procrastinating?
Although I had met with each team individually on a weekend at the beginning of the semester to help them along and to impress upon them the importance of working on this project throughout the semester and to meet the deadlines for various components, the class as a whole did not follow through until the very end of the semester. I was probably much too forgiving and did not have grade consequences for late work.
Next time I will enhance the scaffolding assignments in order to keep students responsible across the semester, alleviating the end-of-semester stress and hopefully working toward a high-level product. To accomplish this, I plan to assign grades for various components, rather than just grading the final result.
3. How do I better achieve the balance between offering helpful guidelines and allowing for intellectual challenge and creativity?
In Fall 2006 I provided students with detailed instructions that streamlined the website-building process. I felt I was removing a degree of difficulty from the project in order to allow students to spend more time and energy on the research and design elements. However, I observed the opposite effect: Students produced web pages that were less creative and less researched. The technical challenge of building the webpage appears to be related to the creativity and level of investment students in previous semesters devoted toward the project. Next time I teach the course, I will not provide them with the specific step-by-step guidelines; however, I know that this presents other challenges (see below).
4. How can I make this project more efficient both for me and the students?
As was to be expected, some students complained a lot about the amount of work involved. Student dissatisfaction with the workload was expressed and reflected in their evaluations of the course. This is despite the fact that in Fall 2006 I provided students with detailed instructions that streamlined the website-building process.
Moreover, this project also required substantial amounts of my time and energy. So far, I have worked on the websites with 35 teams of about five students each. Of these 35 teams, only two or three required little supervision. For most of the teams I had to provide the driving energy and often helped facilitate communication among group members.
I believe the project is a valuable learning tool; however, making it more efficient is necessary. One possibility is to assign various components of the website to particular students rather than to the team as a whole; this could potentially cut down on the workload.
5. How can I increase the level of student investment in their work?
Overall, I believe in the importance of a public element of their work which requires students to present products to the class and/or to the general public. Instead of students completing assignments in attempts to please me (i.e. what does she want from me?), public presentation shifts the focus to doing good work so they can share it with their colleagues with pride. In this way, I become just another member of the audience. In the website and in other projects I include in my courses, I will continue to require public (either to the class or a wider audience) presentation of their work so that students have added incentive to produce high-level work.
6. How can I convince students that learning out of class is time well-spent?
Structuring classes around “Enduring Questions” to which there are no definitive answers was generally appreciated by the students. I felt that engaging in backward design—i.e., designing the whole course, specific lectures, exams, and the website project around specific learning goals—also improved my course. However, I required students to actually read material in preparation for classes and held them responsible for the standard two hours of study for each hour in class; consequently, students complained about the workload.
I believe the keys to having students appreciate the work they must complete out of class time are to a) hold them responsible for learning that material and b) consistently provide them feedback on assignments stemming from work outside the classroom. In a course I am currently teaching, I set the tone early for reading outside of class and based assignments on that reading. Now, students seem self motivated by the fact that they are learning a lot and also realizing that challenging themselves intellectually can be fun. I actually had to revamp some of my lectures and bring them to a higher level, because the reading has improved the students’ critical faculties considerably. In light of this, I realize now that not holding students to deadlines or holding them responsible for smaller components of the website project contributed to students not valuing the work they were required to do out of class.
Thus, although I attempted to alter my course in such a way to facilitate student performance, I was surprised to note that my increased instructions lead to less creative or researched final products. I have also become aware of several challenges that I am currently facing within the structure of this course. However, given these challenges, I still feel that the webpage projects are beneficial to the students and to the cultural community at large. Therefore, I am interested in using these challenges as jumping-off points for future semesters.| << Student Performance | ^TOP^ | Comments >> |
