Summer Term Week 1

We're now a week into summer classes--a double section (50) of online Comp II for me. I'm amazed at what a little civil ranting can do: more students than ever actually completed some type of orientation before starting the course. Of course, I could be badly over-praising myself; it may have been that students heard the horrors of WebCT 6 last semester. Whatever it was, the training is making a difference, and, interestingly, we seem to be having very few JAVA problems. That sort of indicates to me that IT really didn't understand the issues until they hit us in the face last January. At any rate, everyone seems to be able to see what they need to see and write where they need to write. Novel--

Of course, there are those who haven't done anything yet, but they are in a true minority. Most of the students seem to be fluent with their informal discussion board posting, though I'm noticing that some are much briefer in posts than typical during the school year. I'll make a point of getting anal about that with this next module where I'm expecting them to work with solid arguments.

Summer is always a good time for testing tools and teaching strategies. I'll try some group work, just to detect its bumps. I think that the group-manager tool will make this sort of thing fairly feasible this time around--better than earlier versions of WebCT. This first content module has them doing some simple research together. We'll see how many conflicts result. I think about how I would feel working with others I've never seen and, up until last summer, I wouldn't have liked it. But I really felt that I came to know some of the people in the Webcetera course--people whom I would be willing to do research with.