On the Road

This fall, I've agreed to teach the online course I co-developed with Buzz Hoagland. It's an ecology course for practicing middle-school teachers working toward a Master's Degree in Science Education. Today, I met with Kathy Davis to talk about some of the new approaches I'm planning to try.

When I taught it previously, I was somewhat disappointed with the outcomes -- too many students would fade during the course and fail. Kathy has assured me that this was the result of students being subsidized and, now that students are paying their own way, they're more likely to be serious. (This isn't to say I didn't have serious students before -- some of the students were among the most dedicated I've ever had.)

One of the biggest challenges was getting student groups to function effectively. I'm hoping that using Organic Groups in Drupal will provide additional support for students working together closely. I'm also going to clarify the nature of the group work so that the nature of the interaction is more clearly circumscribed.

I'm also planning to add concept-mapping to the activities of the course. There is an excellent concept-mapping software package that allows group interaction and simulataneous editing of concept maps. The challenge is going to be reducing the other work required in the course to provide enough time for students to work on concept maps -- they're very time-consuming. Still, I think it may help make the conceptual structure of the course more concrete. We always knew what it was, but we worried that students sometimes came away with many of the conceptual relationships still vague.