Developing an Online Course

I’m finding myself in a very strange position as I plan this online lit. course.  I am discovering a plethora of tools to use to make the course interactive and interesting, but I’m finding very little in terms of what’s already out there that I might swipe and incorporate into my own course.  I have found a number of online university lit. courses, but I don’t have access to them to see how they’re taught.   I am also feeling quite overwhelmed by the volume of information.  I’m going to have to have my hand held a bit more in designing this course than in my previous one, I think.  There are so many new things, and I haven’t been able to explore them in depth yet.  My goal for this workshop was to get a rough draft of the course planned out, then spend the next few months fine tuning and tweaking.

As for tools and tricks that have worked for me.  I’ve had students create blogs and personal journals.  The blog were great because the students could respond to each other in a creative way, post videos and photos, and post audio responses, and the journals were great for reflective types of assignments that only I saw, and there was no pressure to “look good” in front of the rest of the class.  I also use power point presentations with audio narration and an interactive true/false quiz that presents information in such a way that students can get an idea of what they already know vs what they need to learn.  This is great because I don’t spend a whole lot of time teaching what students already know.

I want to develop more interactive types of activities for the lit. class.  Discussion and interpersonal interaction are paramount to a good lit. class.  It will be interesting to discover just how I will make that happen.