This course has provided the stimulus to think through how my own behaviour can help students engage the course material better. In the past, I have thought of such things as media as helps for students unable (or unwilling) to take the time to read the textbook carefully, but I am now closer to an understanding of the inclusion of media as a way to personalize the course curriculum and to model approach-ability and engagement myself.
Along with this new understanding, I have come to see the production of media as less formal (as well as less lengthy!) contact with students. In the coming year, I hope to produce a short video each week of my regular semester courses. I will aim to connect the video content to curriculum content, along the lines of reinforcing how the week’s material pursues one or more of the learning objectives of the course. My goal will be to help students see these connections more clearly, as well as to present my own engagement and interest in the lessons.
In addition to the strategy above, I also want to learn how to ask forum questions in Moodle that promote greater interaction among students. As I teach critical thinking, I often find students very willing to complete the book exercises, but without true engagement with issues and controversies that they are involved with and presented in everyday life and social contexts. Since a critical component of my critical thinking course is the application of careful thinking skills to everyday situations, I want to post forum items that students find easy to respond to and easy to engage others with.
For the past two decades, I have found forum discussions in philosophy courses superior to in-class discussions, since the forum mode allows students time to think carefully while in-class discussions encourage students to think more quickly than carefully. I have abundant evidence that the quality of online asynchronous discussion is much deeper and more detailed than similar synchronous discussions in face-to-face situations. My goal in this regard will be to achieve a situation at least six times during a semester when forum discussions stimulate some measure of interest on the part of students. This would be roughly one such discussion for every two weeks of the course.
I hope to revisit these two goals for my own engagement in the critical thinking course (as well as analogues for any other courses I am contracted to teach in) at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year to reflect on and revise, as well as to extend further.