Hi all,
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| I really hate pictures. I need one of Bill's Bookshelf shots |
I'm Megan Charley. I'm
between years 3 and 4 of my PhD program in the English Department here at
MSU. I study modernist literature and
film (that's primarily early 20th century stuff; for those of you who don't
have an English background think Hemingway, Woolf, James Joyce, William
Faulkner, etc, and weird avant garde films that drive my students crazy). My work centers on gender, the body, and
visual culture. I have a BA in English from
Oakland University (yes, the one an hour and a half south of here) and an MA in
English from the University of Kentucky (in the much missed Lexington,
Kentucky).
I've been teaching for a little while now. Between here in WRAC and at the University of
Kentucky I've taught three years of composition, and TA'd (teaching my own
recitation sections while a professor taught the lectures) for a few sections
of IAH and Intro to Film. I'm used to
using different technologies to support my face to face classes, and right now
I'm teaching my first fully online class: IAH 201. An experienced professor designed it, so I'm
just running it and making some minor changes as I go. The class is well constructed, but is
exclusively on Angel and limited mostly to basic text. The experience is making me think about ways
to spice up the class to help students better engage with the material.
The English department has asked us to design and pitch an
online class for next year-- so these days I'm thinking a lot about how things like close reading (of literature and film) can be done online. The idea of teaching a film class fully online sounds challenging and exciting, so
that's what I've been focusing on the most. You'll all be hearing more about that over the next several weeks.
Welcome Megan! One of things we'll try to read and think creatively about is the ways we want students to interact in a course in order to achieve whatever learning goals we might have. Of course, we'll also consider how we recruit technologies of various kinds, in various settings to foster that interaction and facilitate learning.
ReplyDeleteFor your IAH section, this is a good framing question to begin as you think about an online or hybrid design: what kinds of interaction among students should/must happen in order for them to learn X? (where *what* they learn might be a bit of knowledge, might be one or a set of values, might be a way of thinking or even a way of doing something).
Hey Megan,
ReplyDeleteYou might want to take a look at "Essential Elements" by Elbaum, McIntyre and Smith.
It's a good starter book for designing online classes- pretty relevant and an easy read!
Jennifer