For reasons now lost in the minutes of a senior suite meeting, it’s the first week of our second semester here. On the plus side, the weekend’s storm didn’t do any damage; on the minus, it’s been nearly two months since our students last sat in class.
Second semester means it’s also time for my first-year UG module on European integration. You might recall that last year I flipped it all around.
One of the big issues with that format was that very few students ended up coming to class. A large part of that seemed to be that they felt they were getting enough information from the video lecture, not least as I was using the lecture slot to deal with Q&A [not much Q, a lot of ex-temporising A].
With that in mind, I’m going to try a slightly different approach this time round.
I’ll still be leaving space for Q&A in the lecture, but most of the session will be filled with getting the students to draw assorted visual representations of elements of the European Union.
Thus, one week I might ask them to produce a diagram of the EU, or the factors that need to be considered when analysing it.
Since I’ve got 120 bodies in the class, my idea is to have a Google Doc they can access and then upload their picture (either by drawing directly on it, or by adding a photo of something they’ve done by hand). That way, I’ll get their work real-time and can display it back to them for discussion and further refinement.
At the end of the lecture, I plan to go away and produce something to summarise their contributions: maybe with a little commentary too.
Doing this will, I hope, generate more interest than simply waiting for someone to ask a question, and produce material that cuts across the rest of the provision, so they see value in contributing.
The danger is, of course, that if I’m summarising afterwards, then students might not see so much point in attending the lecture session itself, since they’ll still get access to it all. But I’ll cross that bridge as and when we get to it.
In the meantime, it’s off to the QR code generator…