Wendi's Reading Notes #1

Defining & limiting course content—The three categories can be a struggle among educators.  It is important to express to our students why topics were selected and placed in that specific order.  This appears easy to do, but hard to implement.  How can educators improve on limiting course content?

Select instructional methods for each class —“What do I want my students to be doing, thinking, or feeling?”  It is not only important to determine what students will learn, but how we intend them to best learn.  Lang discussed this in his chapter.  What level or degree of learning are we expecting?  Do many instructors know Bloom’s Taxonomy or something similar?

Motivating students to read & use syllabus—Use a quiz or assignment over the syllabus?  Why should we?  Ideally, students should be responsible to read, follow, and ask questions based off of the syllabus material.  Will students perceive a quiz or assignment over content in the syllabus as busy work and only for the sake of completing it?  It is frustrating to spend countless hours working on a document for the entire semester, only to have them read or adhere to a fraction of it.  How can we motivate students to be responsible?  A detailed syllabus shows students you’re organized, where they’re going with the course, and expectations.  Reminding students one or two times multiplied by each student tends to be a lot of time spent away from course content.  What can we do?

Office hours—I don’t use office hours as a student, so why would I expect my students to use them?  Does this make the student “bad” or uninterested?  I think they get caught up in life and make whatever attempt they deem appropriate or necessary to check this off their list.  Discussing this would express the importance of giving the proper attitude, attention, and patience to maintaining office hours.

E-mail—How do you determine the “appropriate” amount of time to address e-mail?  How does that change when the course is on-line?  E-mail can become all-consuming and I struggle with how much and often I need to be responding to their requests for information primarily found in the syllabus.  How do we “tone down” e-mails?  Sensitivity is less of an issue when instructors and students get to know one another.

E-mail, texting, & IMing—Technology is great, but I want to meet students in person!  How do we make e-mail, texting, and IMing more personable?  How can this be accomplished if meeting regularly in class is not an option?

Promises—I never thought of course or learner outcomes or objectives as promises.  I do agree that some objectives do not include enough detail to determine what they will be learning, how they will be learning, and to what degree they’ll be learning something.  Why is it important for instructors to constantly refer back to the course/learner promises and, possibly, re-evaluate their instruction?  How can they not afford to do that?