PANEL & ROUNDTABLE: Reimagining Student Projects (90 mins)

Elizabeth Ferguson, Robert Dietrich, Dann Sklarew, Ying-Ying Kuo, Cara Frankenfeld
2020
Panel Topics: • Project Planning as Part of Reflective Learning (Elizabeth Ferguson) • This activity addresses the teaching challenge of students not having a comprehensive understanding of the type of work required from them throughout the course of the semester. Instructors create course schedules with detailed overviews of major project dates, small homework assignments, and exam dates; however, many undergraduate students that I've worked with don't dig into the calendars for each class and
more » ... put all of that information in a single location. Therefore, I created a project planning activity at the beginning of the semester to have students, to the best of their ability, fill out a 16-week calendar where they input all of their course assignments, readings, homework, and exam dates for all of their classes in a single spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has a location for the course, assignment type, how much time they estimate each assignment will take, and the due dates. Then throughout the semester students are able to use this spreadsheet to reflect on their progress and adjust the time they thought the assignment was going to take and what they learned about how much time the assignment actually took. Students have found this helpful because they were able to get a better handle on their workload and even know when their final exams were scheduled at the beginning of the semester. • Running Project Demos in Collaborate Ultra (Robert Dieterich and Ying-Ying Kuo) • In a fully online course, it is easy for students to feel isolated from each other as well as from the teacher. This is especially true for a course that is built primarily around individual work. Without special effort, an online course may provide fewer opportunities for interaction and rapport-building on a student-to-student, as well as a student-to-teacher, level. In my online course, GAME140 Applied Coding for Game Design, I hold periodic video meetings using Collaborate Ultra as a venue for students to demonstrate their completed projects for other [...]
doi:10.13021/itlcp.2020.2838 fatcat:jii2gs4z4rh2rgsofd45dukd5i