Jim’s viewable streams of thought

Up until now, I’ve developed hybrid units for my students in AP psychology.  Though the online assignments ended up being a substantial part of the students grade (about 30-40%), I approached the construction of the assignments from the point of view of the classroom as focal point of learning.  In some ways, hybrid classes offer the best of both worlds, the personalization of the f2f class, thus eliminating the fears expressed by Scorza in Do Online Students Dream of Electric Teachers (pg. 45), as well as the resource rich, convenient, flexibility of the online environment.  I was going to approach the creation of the example course for ETAP 687:Online teaching, in the same way.  Now, having gone through all but one of the example courses, I’m rethinking this idea.  Or rather, discarded it entirely. 

Several times (twice?) during Alex’s interviews in the course observations, she’s rhetorically asked  “if the instructor does all the work, who does all the learning?”  This is a solid constructivist point of view and it becomes a necessity in creating a successful online teaching environment.  Keeping this in mind, I was planning on using Jing to create at least one screencast for my course; now, I’m planning on having the students use Jing as a culminating activity to create a screencast summary of what they think are the most important elements of human psychological development.  This idea is an inspiration from Steven Zucker’s culminating activity in which he has the students create a final exam.  In fact, I had quite a few good ideas from Steven Zucker’s course…

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