{"id":1002,"date":"2016-09-12T10:00:46","date_gmt":"2016-09-12T15:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keithcchan.com\/?p=1002"},"modified":"2016-11-20T02:04:17","modified_gmt":"2016-11-20T08:04:17","slug":"fall-teaching-changes-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/2016\/09\/fall-teaching-changes-part-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Fall Teaching Changes, part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Now that we are a few weeks into the semester, I have a little time to reflect on how my course has changed. I have tweaked the Introduction to Physical Anthropology course in a few ways to further make the experience for students more comprehensive and ultimately more memorable. Two of these ideas were started when I was teaching a six-week course over the summer, but refined a little more:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/document\/d\/1WFILt-r2lFT_y3ZcgcUVz6U-_4NPmJwXxHGGsserZeI\/edit\">A Related Media page<\/a> accessible from Blackboard. Rather than use Blackboard&#8217;s system (as the school is switching to Canvas anyway), I set up a Google Doc that has an organized list of online media related to each class topic. The most frequent sources of these media are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/scishow\">SciShow<\/a> episodes on Youtube and BBC documentaries on Netflix. A future change may be to move to a spreadsheet format for its sorting ability, though this might look more sterile and actually less inviting for students.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/drkeithcchan\">A professional Twitter feed<\/a>, accessible from that site or viewable in Blackboard. This change solved a nagging problem for me: I see a lot of interesting articles online that are directly related to class topics, but I can only share so many in Blackboard announcements and at the beginning of class. While I still share some choice discoveries in these places, now I have a place to share the many other links I find. I had several followers of the Twitter feed during the summer session, but only a handful across my three classes now. I never mentioned the feed to my summer course and I have not brought it up to my current classes. Perhaps the greater focus on Blackboard allowed more online students to find it on their own.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One unexpected wrinkle that came up during the implementation of the Twitter feed was the dilemma of whether I should follow my student followers back. In general Twitter subculture, following back would be the polite thing to do, but I chose not to do so to keep some distance from my students&#8217; personal lives.<\/p>\n<p>Another complication of this Twitter account changed a secondary\u00c2\u00a0goal I had at the start: to give reminders for class deadlines. This idea became unusable because my three classes this semester do not go by the same schedule: I have Monday-Wednesday classes and Tuesday-Thursday classes. Also, the Labor Day holiday threw these two schedules\u00c2\u00a0out of sync, so the Tuesday class is first new lecture I give each week. Tweeting deadlines for these two class setups would probably cause mass confusion with me and my students, so I opted to save deadline reminders for in-class and twice weekly emails. While this systems works, it means that the Twitter feed is more for fun and not as critical for students to view.<\/p>\n<p>Next time, I will bring up some other changes I have made that were inspired by reading <em>Small Teaching<\/em> by James Lang (2016), a very rewarding and inspirational book.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>References<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Lang, J. M. (2016). <em>Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning<\/em>. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass &amp; Pfeiffer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Now that we are a few weeks into the semester, I have a little time to reflect on how my course has changed. I have tweaked the Introduction to Physical Anthropology course in a few ways to further make the experience for students more comprehensive and ultimately more memorable. Two&#8230; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/2016\/09\/fall-teaching-changes-part-1.html\" class=\"readmore\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Fall Teaching Changes, part 1&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Fall Teaching Changes, part 1","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[20],"tags":[77],"class_list":["post-1002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1002\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}