For the final class reflections, I have copy and pasted the text from the original blog, and have made comments in red below each section. My own separate suggestions are in blue.
Change Review Weeks to Planning Weeks. This is a really big change to the class, but one that I am really excited about. Right now, there is an Orientation Week in Week 1, and then Review Weeks in Week 8 and Week 15. What I am thinking, though, is that instead of reviewing, PLANNING would be more useful, especially in terms of getting people to plan their own time schedule for the class. The result would be Orientation Week in Week 1, then a Planning Week in Week 2 (focused on time management but also other kinds of plans you might make for the semester), so the regular reading and storytelling assignments would go from Week 3-8. Then there would be a Planning and Review Week in Week 9, with the remaining reading and storytelling weeks for the rest of the semester. The main goal here is to try to find a way for people to create and commit to their own schedules for the class instead of relying on the Canvas due dates (which are obviously not going to be convenient for everybody). If you have any other ideas about how to help people with managing their class schedule and time management in general, let me know!
I like this idea. I love planning, and I think this would have been great this semester. It would have helped me have a general scope of what I had left in this class.
Expand the Story Planning Option. This was a fantastic idea that someone suggested in the midterm survey, and I actually implemented it partway through the semester (something that I rarely do, but it was such a good idea!). Next semester, I will have that story planning option available from the very start, plus I am going to expand on that idea to be useful for people doing Storybooks: in addition to using this option for planning a regular weekly story post, people who are doing Storybooks could use the planning option to plan the upcoming story for their Storybook. Did you try the story planning option this semester? Was it useful? What resources can I provide that would help people with the planning process? Any thoughts you have about that would be very helpful!
I never used the story planning option except once maybe, because I'm the type of person to sit down and get everything done, at least for this class, to just start writing. Yes, I am a planner, but for this class, a planning option wasn't really needed. But I'm sure other students would greatly benefit from it.
Create more audio recordings. I don't have a professional-quality recording voice, but I like to record stories, and some students in the Indian Epics class have found the SoundCloud recordings helpful; those of you in Myth-Folklore can see how that works here: Vyasa and Ganesha. There are some units in the Myth-Folklore class that have audio from LibriVox, but I was thinking that I might record at least one story from each of the Myth-Folklore units so that there would be more audio available. Also, I was thinking that if there are any of you in the class who like to read out loud and would want to share recordings back with me, I could make that into one of the options for extra credit reading so that you could share your mp3 audio recordings, and I could put your recordings at SoundCloud to share with the class too. So, let me know what you think both about me creating some more audio and also about creating audio together as a class.
Again, I never used this option because I'm a visual learner. When I was in grade school I had a hard time focusing because some of the stories would be read using a recording, and I never could figure out how to pay attention and comprehend. But again, I think this would be useful for other students.
Create writing tutorial videos. There are some writing areas that could benefit from a video presentation. For example, I could do some screencast videos working through the process of finding comma splices and fixing them, and also videos on how to write dialogue with correct use of quotation marks and punctuation. Since those are both complex writing topics, I was thinking that a step-by-step process could be helpful. If you've ever watched Lynda.com or Khan Academy videos, that's what I have in mind, although obviously my videos would not be as sophisticated in terms of production values. I think I could learn how to make something simple, though, that might be useful. If you are interested in something like this, let me know what writing topics you would like for me to focus on.
I like this idea. I'm not sure I would ever use it, but I like the idea for other students. Again, I'm more of a read-on-page learner rather than a video/audio learner.
Create thematic reading units. Right now in both classes the readings are organized around selections from books so that in any given week you are reading selections from a specific book (or the whole book if the book is short). I was thinking, though, that it might be useful to build some thematic units, kind of like the way the thematic Storybook projects work. So, for example, in the Myth-Folklore class, I could create a week-long reading unit of "Ghost Stories" or "Trickster Stories," while in the Indian Epics class I could create a unit of "Love Stories" or "Dharma Stories," etc. If this is something you think would be good to do, please let me know what kinds of themes you think would be good choices!
YES! I love this idea. I think this would get me more excited for the units to come and it would actually help my brain organize the units since they go by themes instead of geographical location or countries.
My own suggestions for this class:
I would suggest try to cut down the amount of text used to explain assignments. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed with beginning an assignment due to the amount of text was there. After reading through all of it, I realized that the assignment wasn't as difficult as the text made it out to be. I'm the type of person that like to read bullet points or lists of instructions. It helps me understand concepts better and I can read through it quicker. Maybe having shorter instructions but then using bolded text with questions if students get lost.
For example: Word Count? 500
Don't know how to do a bibliography? Click here. (But again wherever the link leads, the text should be short, concise so that it doesn't take the student more time to read the instructions than to actually do the assignment.)
THAT'S ALL I HAVE. This is a great class. I've already recommended it to my friends!
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