So far the feedback we have received is just from the peer groups. I think maybe we are now a bit behind from the Schoology calendar? In general, the peer feedback was very good – other than they seemed to have a huge beef with blogging. Three short reflection assignments were labeled as “too much” by a few. We left those in as we felt that it would help the students reflect on their progress as well as give their mentors and/or major professors a good window into how they were doing on in the course. There were also considerable questions about finding people to teach this course or to serve as mentors. That was a weird one for us, as the same questions could be leveled against our peer groups design document. But usually, when you get to the design part of creating a course, whoever is hiring you to design already has that in place (or at least a plan to get them in place). There was also one set of feedback from some that just didn’t like our idea, sociocultural theory, or open-ended processes in general. Most of that feedback seemed to be based on just telling us how much they didn’t like it with little constructive feedback (or at least little that just wasn’t a repeat of what other people had said).
All of this did lead us to clarify our document to point out that the mentors will be selected and motivated by the department, and the other work was designed to help the major professor know their students better and not add work. I also attended a session about surviving the PhD process that really opened my eyes to see that there is a need for this course to be a reality.
We are just starting to work through how to structure the prototype. I envision it to be a self-paced course or group on Schoology or Moodle or something like that. We need to discuss more as a group, and that may change. But in there would be a basic set of brief modules that introduces all of the parts of the PHD program that students need to be successful. Questions and concerns would be addressed to social networking tools that are already in place. Students would be directed on how to start a Personal Learning Network or Informal Cohort to help with the rest of the assignments, and then the rest of the course would be a series of benchmarks for students to check their progress through creating their plans. Our design document really helped us clarify the order much of this would happen and what goes where in the course.
As of now, we are still clarifying our roles in the creation of the prototype. I seem to still be leading this process – never was elected to do that, but I seem to be the one that is getting the ball rolling. I am comfortable with that, but I would feel better if there were quicker responses to the emails I send out and people were stepping up to take on different parts of the prototype. That is what is difficult so far – I wonder if my group understands that there are only 4-5 weeks left and they all need to step up and take a significant part of the prototype or else it just won’t get done. Now, we all get along great and I don’t have any personality problems with anyone on the team. We just need everyone to step up and say “I will take on ______.”
As far as the prototype itself, the main concern is just collecting the information. We don’t want to get to the presentation and have someone ask “ummmm…. Why is there nothing in here about publications” or some other major part that we just missed because we were pushing so fast. That is my biggest concern – missing a big piece because we get tunnel-visioned on a smaller piece that is hard to figure out.
Reading Notes:
Click here to read my notes for this week on Evernote
—