The electronic systems were adequate, although some difficulties meant that the daily interchanges were not as rich and thorough as I had anticipated. Our highly interactive format allowed the students to compare their cultures, and sometimes this was a surprise both on a personal and a political level.
Writing
Students’ writing improved over time. The KU Honors students expected to get A’s on their papers, an outcome that didn’t always happen. I also challenged the students to write collaboratively, a process that didn’t go as well as I had anticipated. Finally, I wanted to develop writing that was clear and professional in tone and style.
Overall, the students who were in the middle made the most movement. Students who started off with unrefined writing skills improved those skills. One problem with the writing was that I gave extensions on the last two papers. Because of this late turn-in date, students didn’t get them back before they had to write their final papers. This limited the feedback that they received.
During the semester, I reiterated that I didn’t want a journal entry nor was this to be a high-tech research paper, but instead students needed to write in-between “think” pieces. It was hard for some students not to write “I, I, I” papers, one of two main problems that I saw with the writing. One student, a smart, high-achiever, was frustrated early in the semester because she was not getting the grades that she was used to. I suggested that she needed to work on organization in order to clear up her problems. She did this for a while, but then fell back into her old ways of journal-type writing.
Another problem was students’ terrible habit of using an overload of quotations. Students avoided plagiarizing by quoting everything, but I wanted them to realize it’s okay to paraphrase. I encouraged them to use quotations when they added value to the paper. Some papers had material that showed up on turnitin.com, but that was because of all the quotations used: students still needed to learn how to integrate other ideas into their own ideas. They were giving credit to the original source, but their writing read as a string of quotations.
Course Content
Students were often surprised about what they learned regarding others in the world. For example, one student’s overseas partner quoted Snoop Dog. Common American cultural references such as this were unexpected, and it was amazing to the class that a person abroad would be able to make such a reference. Along with the surprise of similarities came the surprise of differences. The KU students didn’t see eye-to-eye on issues with the other students, a learning experience that revealed other people in the world think differently.
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