Have an interactive CD. We did not and it made learning difficult for
many students. Although we tried to be creative in using the listserve
to connect with students and focus on concepts, I pulled more and more
into very traditional delivery since the text book was the students'
primary source of support.
We set up a list-serve for discussion. That worked marginally well. We
tried to get students to pose questions to the list and have students
answer the questions before the instructors jumped in. That was
informative to us, because the "help" was many times off-base, but the
group dynamic did not work really well.
We posed some questions that compared topics and focused on vocabulary
and symbolism. For example, we had student work a number of numeric
problems involving raising numbers to a power, then discuss whether the
following statements were true or false:
-x^2 is always positive or zero.
x is always positive or zero.
-x is negative.
etc.
We did some things where students looked up web sites and discussed
information--like following stocks for several days. Those worked
fairly well.
We taught a very traditional course. Without a CD project or computer
applications background for our students, it was hard to do much that
was not straight out of the book. I would like, instead, to do more
with data collection and graphing devices and spreadsheets--something
that if taught online must require computer knowledge as prerequisite
material or could possibly be team taught with a computer skills
course. A statistics course might be a better match.
For grading, we set up a system where students took 2 monitored tests
(midterm and final) as well as some online tests, projects, discussion
and homework (looked at while they were taking the monitored exams). We
"put all points in the same basket" but weighted the in-class exams
heavily. In addition, we said that no matter what the other grades
were, to make a C or higher in the class the student had to score a
minimum of 68% on the inclass exams. In other words, 65% average on the
monitored exams with an overall 82% average is a "D" Once the minimum
conpetency was met however, we counted other points towards the grade.
Martha
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