Now that we are a few weeks into the semester, I have a little time to reflect on how my course has changed. I have tweaked the Introduction to Physical Anthropology course in a few ways to further make the experience for students more comprehensive and ultimately more memorable. Two of these ideas were started when I was teaching a six-week course over the summer, but refined a little more:
- A Related Media page accessible from Blackboard. Rather than use Blackboard’s system (as the school is switching to Canvas anyway), I set up a Google Doc that has an organized list of online media related to each class topic. The most frequent sources of these media are SciShow episodes on Youtube and BBC documentaries on Netflix. A future change may be to move to a spreadsheet format for its sorting ability, though this might look more sterile and actually less inviting for students.
- A professional Twitter feed, accessible from that site or viewable in Blackboard. This change solved a nagging problem for me: I see a lot of interesting articles online that are directly related to class topics, but I can only share so many in Blackboard announcements and at the beginning of class. While I still share some choice discoveries in these places, now I have a place to share the many other links I find. I had several followers of the Twitter feed during the summer session, but only a handful across my three classes now. I never mentioned the feed to my summer course and I have not brought it up to my current classes. Perhaps the greater focus on Blackboard allowed more online students to find it on their own.
One unexpected wrinkle that came up during the implementation of the Twitter feed was the dilemma of whether I should follow my student followers back. In general Twitter subculture, following back would be the polite thing to do, but I chose not to do so to keep some distance from my students’ personal lives.
Another complication of this Twitter account changed a secondary goal I had at the start: to give reminders for class deadlines. This idea became unusable because my three classes this semester do not go by the same schedule: I have Monday-Wednesday classes and Tuesday-Thursday classes. Also, the Labor Day holiday threw these two schedules out of sync, so the Tuesday class is first new lecture I give each week. Tweeting deadlines for these two class setups would probably cause mass confusion with me and my students, so I opted to save deadline reminders for in-class and twice weekly emails. While this systems works, it means that the Twitter feed is more for fun and not as critical for students to view.
Next time, I will bring up some other changes I have made that were inspired by reading Small Teaching by James Lang (2016), a very rewarding and inspirational book.
References
Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass & Pfeiffer.