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Part I is here.

So I’m well into writing my all-online US History survey course for this fall now.  Oddly enough, after having spent so much time planning how I want to do it, the actually writing seems very easy.  It’s also totally in line with everything I’ve been doing with my pedagogy lately.  Most notably, recognizing the “You Really Can Google Anything” problem, I’ve turned the whole thing into a kind of composition course, which is basically what I’ve already been doing in all of my other courses anyway.

For fear of this post being several thousand words long, I think I’m going to break this update into two parts.  The first is going to cover theory and (once again) discuss tools.  Then I’ll eventually going to get around to write another post about assignments.

It actually helps that my college has made a terrible mistake with respect to all the first fully-online classes they’ll offer.  They listed mine in the catalog with an “O” next to it, and a time that says “to be arranged.”  Nobody knows what the “O” means and “to be arranged” sounds ominous.  Therefore, my class currently has zero students enrolled in it.  Donna Souder, the Director of our glorious Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has plans to rectify that with a big push for the few online classes all around the university closer to the Fall, but I’m actually grateful that I’ll likely be able to start small.

Donna deserves mention here again for her goal of getting an online version of every general education course in the university going – a goal to which I’m contributing.  At first blush, that may seem stupid as students already have an option of taking classes through our extended studies program or they could take such classes through a separate system campus that’s entirely online or any other remotely respectable online provider they may chose and transfer the credit in.  Unfortunately, we as a department don’t get any FTE (Full Time Enrollment) credit if they do that.  If enough students do this, both our history program and the university in general run the risk of being eaten alive.

Donna’s objective is to distinguish our courses as being the ones  with living, breathing professors available on campus if you need them, so I’ll actually be keeping office hours over at the CTL in the Fall where the rooms are big enough to talk to more than one student at once and the wifi actually works…but that’s another story.

With respect to the course itself, I’m writing most of it on the free version of Canvas.  My now-very-well-known hatred of BlackBoard is not the only reason I like Canvas.  However, the fact that the gradebook can compute totals from grades with pluses and minuses and our version of BlackBoard can’t certainly is another extra asset in my book.  I also like the fact that in Canvas I can turn off the bells and whistles that I don’t want to use.  Most importantly, though, I’ve written at least a little of every part of the course where I want to use Canvas and I haven’t had to go back and take a tutorial once.  The whole thing is so instinctual, it reminds me of the way Apple Operating Systems used to be (and I’m sure that’s intentional).

For discussion and turning in papers, I’m using Slack.  I’ve already written about why I love Slack.  Two semesters later, I still do for the same reasons.  My thoughts here are to set up a channel for each assignment as well as private groups for students who don’t want to post there questions out loud.  And while I’m sure Canvas has an absolutely lovely way to share files (and I will likely put my handouts there), the drop and drag capabilities of Slack make it by far the easiest way to get papers.  Indeed, judging from the increased propensity of students to avoid e-mail at all costs I’d say it’s the best way too.

This post is getting a tad long now, so I’ll just list the other programs on the sheet and describe how I’ll use them when I cover assignments.  One is Milestone Documents.  I’m definitely going to use Hypothes.is with Milestone Documents, but the exact assignment is still a little up-in-the-air at this point.  Weirdly enough, I’m going back to a textbook for this course – not because I have any new love for textbooks, but as a content resource that students can consult.  The book is comparatively cheap and all online, but since I won’t be holding them accountable for specific facts buried inside of it (since the heart of the course is essays) I don’t feel too bad about backtracking in this direction.

Exactly how are those essay assignments going to be structured?  How exactly will I use online annotation?  How the heck can I possibly grade online discussion?  Well, I haven’t answered those questions myself yet, but whenever I do I’ll write up the next post in this series.