Word for the day: ebullient. The picture to the right is a balloon launch in GPH111 on Valentine's Day. One went to Silly Mountain Road east of Apache Junction and another to east-central Colorado, 632 miles as the balloons fly. The picture mirrors my experience the day I realized my google group "4spheres" had reached critical mass and became a collaborative effort with a life of it's own.
At the start there were several things I knew I wanted to accomplish by creating a hybrid course:
- A strong sense of community.
- A digital repository of course materials.
- An online site for collaborative team research projects.
- A collection of web references available for future classes.
- Increased instructor & student interaction using email.
There were some things I hadn't figured out. I knew I wanted students to map their photos, but I didn't know how we were going to do this. I knew I wanted students to link to google documents & photos, but I didn't know how we would do this. I knew I wanted students to make their team projects available for everybody to share, but I was unclear of the design.
Because the course is hybrid, I had the luxury to figure this out as we went along. It's true that some students grumbled because I didn't have all the instructions written out in advance. Finally, Shelley's CIS237 class started and I quickly began learning the technology...except on my brain-dead days when I couldn't swat a fly.
By the luck of gods, I got a student in my class who gets paid $8/hr to be the webmaster for CGC's primary website. Brian T. decided he wanted to create his own google group for his team's project. Other students copied him, as did I. His group's example became the nucleus around which the 4spheres group coalesced. In theory and practice, I should have provided this example myself, but I did not foresee how time intensive creating an online course would be. I also did not foresee how time intensive it becomes to answer email and read online discussions for 50 students. In my utter exhaustion I had to let go of the outcome and resolved to show compassion to the students and myself for whatever came of my sincere and honest effort to teach my students real-world career skills in environmental sustainability.
In addition to Brian, I had two other guardian angels: Shelley R. & Elijah S. Shelley's course wiki brought me up to speed about what was needed for a successful online course. Elijah S's "Active Learning Professional Learning Community" helped me develop the teams, team feedback and team review. By asking students to review each other's work, they not only learned from each other but started competing with each other for the best looking group site. Even the team at the bottom of the heap who had gone on a sit-down strike changed their tune when they clued-in these projects were examples of real-world career skills when it came time for recommendations.
The last and most unexpected twist occurred when it came time for me to share my group site with the CIS237 class. Suddenly I had student team sites that looked better than my own. This put me in the uncomfortable predicament of competing with my own students for best looking group site. I must say, in fifteen years of teaching it was a first. But it was also ebullient.
Here's a link to video content provided by one of my students: NGC's "Inside the Tornado," (YouTube; 6 minutes).
