On September 22,Phil Carr (Archaeology) led a panel of faculty members in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work in a Teaching Seminar on Teaching Social Sciences Online.  Phil, Roma Hanks (Sociology), Nicole Carr (Sociology), and Mark Moberg (Anthropology) each spoke about their experiences of building and teaching online courses, and while they all approached teaching online very differently, several of them said they wouldn’t want to go back to the traditional classroom.

Mark said that instead of speaking his lectures in the classroom, he simply types them out and makes the lecture available to his students as online text.  His approach was to inundate students with information.  He also doesn’t give exams, relying instead on papers and online discussions.

Roma tried service-learning and chat in the past, but neither seemed to go over very well with her students.  She has had success with group projects, and she loves the threaded discussions.  She gives students half credit for their first post and then the other half when they respond to someone else or refer to the readings.

Phil added that his favorite online activity is peer review.  He will take the student’s name off a paper and send it to another student for feedback.

Perhaps the best thing about the seminar, however, was a note I received soon after from a faculty member who had attended.

Great workshop.  Very useful to have one that was more about content than about the technical stuff.  I feel more optimistic about on-line teaching.

And that is what drives everything we do in PETAL, whether it’s a Teaching Seminar (as this session was) or a Technology Workshop.  We’re not about the “technical stuff.”  Sure we’ll talk about that to some extent, but we try, as much as possible, to talk about ways to improve teaching and learning.  Sometimes technology is involved in that, but teaching strategy is always involved.