Session 6 - Absorb, Do, Connect, Repeat!

Based on the work that we did as a team last week, please consider the following activities:

Absorb
Course Objective: Students articulate the political impact of the agricultural revolution, urban revival and intellectual renewal. (Week 7)

For students to have an understanding of the political impact of the agricultural revolution, urban revival and intellectual renewal, they need to have knowledge of the events that led up to these three revitalizations, the events that occurred during these three revitalizations and the events that followed as a result of these three revitalizations. Students will gain this knowledge from both the readings of the week and the pre-recorded lecture of Dr. Hunziker. While not the most interactive form of learning, these activities will se the context, establish the vocabulary, introduces the principles and supplies the instructions of the unit.


Do
Course Objective: Students articulate the Crisis of the Middle Ages.  (Week 8)

Building off of the field trip from week 8, students will engage in an online role play of what life was like for various peoples during the middle ages. Using the information that they found from the lecture, readings and most importantly that which they found during the field trip pertaining to their specific type of person, the class, in smaller discussion groups, will work through a series of scenarios (one per group) with the best scores being assigned to those who showcase their synthesized and applied understanding of what life was like.

Connect
Course Objective: Students clarify their understanding of and form broader opinions of all course material through weekly learner-learner interaction.

Students will take their understanding of the weekly course material and synthesize their understanding into one well-formulated question. This question will then be formatted and posted by the TA in the discussion forum with students interacting with each other through both responses and questions to the ideas put forth by their classmates.

"Create"
The group role play activity would be organized by Dr. Hunziker to allow each group member to showcase their understanding of life in the middle ages through their interactions in response to his prompt.

To set the scene and make it a bit more fun, Dr. Hunziker would record the introduction to the overall scenario set for us. Moreover, I would have Dr. Hunziker record the scenario for each team. As we would want the students to have both the audio and the transcript; I would work with Dr. Hunziker to detail each of the scenarios in a word document first. After recording, we would write out the transcript of exactly what Dr. Hunziker said and make both available to the students via links on the week 8 page of the interface.

On the discussion board, the basic scenarios would be listed out once more, with assigned group member names and roles (prepared in advance by the TA's).

"Create": to infinity... and beyond!
If I were to create this same activity with the benefits of a graphic designer, video editor and web programmer, let me first and foremost say that Dr. Hunziker would have the benefit of recording his scenarios with both costuming and music in a medieval scene (backdrop at the worst). The rest of the scenario, past the initial layout would also benefit from the work of the graphic designer and web programmer in that we would be able to change the scene and add additional elements through a pre-programmed game sort of environment that would adapt the scene in response to decisions, actions and reactions as communicated by the group members.


A Possible Exam

As a teacher of a convergent material (mathematics) I am always searching for ways to guarantee that the work I consider and for which I assign credit, was actually completed by the student him or herself. If I cannot, in some way ascertain this, then I tend to assign it very low points as I do not want it to change a student's grade too radically. So, bearing this in mind, it will come as no surprise then that I want to make sure that the work of every student in this class is his or her own as well.

As a result of this I would be very unlikely to use any true/false or pick-one questions. I just fear students working an exam together and messaging correct answers back and forth and finding them on the internet.

Use of pick-multiple, fill-in-the-blanks, matching-list and sequence would be judicious with reference to how I might be able to add to the question for the student at hand to show their understanding and how it contributed to their selection of answers. So, for example, I might have a matching-list with the following stem:

Match the ideas below to the document which put them forth. (Students would have a series of ideas and have to match them to one of the following from the Constitutionalism in England segment of Week 15: "The Petition of Right", "Second Treatise on Government", "English Bill of Rights" and "The Declaration of Independence". Following this question, I would have a short composition question that would ask the students something like, "select two of the writings from the question above and compare and contrast their main ideas."

Students would be assigned to complete the exam by a certain day with it being released a pre-determined number of days before its due date. I should expect the exam to comprise no more than 10 questions that require composition for response and that many or fewer of any of the other type of question to allow for students to demonstrate mere understanding of facts. I feel comfortable assigning this lower level thinking fewer opportunities and fewer points as Dr. Hunziker's main focus for the course was to: "improve your ability to analyze various types of historical sources critically, write clearly and effectively, and articulate yourself intelligently and confidently in front of others. These are skills that will benefit you no matter what your chosen field of study or career may be." He wants the students to be able to internalize these ideas and be able to put forth their own ideas and the best way to do that is through composition.

Cheers,

Michelle