Oh, isn’t this the ultimate question for any teacher!
Trying to “keep it real,” a small group of DePaul Teaching Commons souls put our heads together recently to create this resource!
No two teachers approach these questions in the same way so—trying to “keep it real”—this site provides several different approaches.
Approach 1: From “what you want to know” to “what you need to assign”
Being an instructional designer requires me to have many tools at my disposal to create exciting and meaningful course content. Often, content needs to be displayed in a “chunked” manner to make navigating through the material easier. And it’s nice to have something that is visually appealing as well. For this, I’ve found myself using Softchalk. As with any product, it has things it excels at, and it has limitations. Recently, Softchalk 5 came out, and I was quite excited.
With any product, the goal of a good designer is to anticipate and meet the needs of the user, since it is the user who holds purchasing power. It is difficult (or impossible) to fully anticipate what a user will do with a product—think of the warning labels on products like irons, which may seem ridiculous (i.e., “Do not use the iron on clothes that you are wearing.”) but which show how far companies must go to protect themselves from the “ingenuity” of users. However, it is often user manipulation of a product that can lead to improvements in the technology, which is why so many companies clamor for consumer opinions and ideas about how their products can be used.
Perhaps it’s the end-of-summer’s-approaching ennui or plain old cranky, middle-aged contrariness, but as I witness the barnstorming enthusiasm for Facebook-like social media on display at any given online-learning conference and contrast that with the drumbeat reports of Facebook’s declining popularity, I can’t help but think that some of us are living in a state of denial.
I think our intent is good. We want to serve our students, we want to make it easy for them to communicate, we want to create a socially cohesive learning environment, and we want to give them the tools they need to succeed. We think we know our students; we think we know what they want. So let’s build our own social sites!
One of my favorite things about language education is that it’s a complete free-for-all. No one cares where you studied or how many books your instructors have published. Results are all that matter (unless, of course, you’re planning to become a professor yourself). Students have their own objectives in mind when they take language courses, and the only assessments that matter to them are the ones they pass or fail in the real world: