Over the last year, my approach to blogging has been to refine my thinking until I get it just right before posting. You should see all the drafts I have! I’m going to try something different here that some brighter than I call, wait for it…blogging. I have an insight worth sharing so I’m just going to put it out there, and worry about getting it right later.
As I have done before, this term I’m teaching two sections of Principles of Macro, one online and one face-to-face. There’s a lot more I should say about the former, but let me just make one point: I find a terrific benefit to teach online and face-to-face in parallel. I learn things in each that improves the teaching in the other. Case in point, Friday I moderated a discussion of the role of economics in the liberal arts and sciences. (Is there a role?) I do this to help students situate my class in our schools curriculum. It’s always a fun discussion and students seem to get something from it.
I often put a question on the first exam that originates from the discussion. Which raised a potential problem in my head: The online section had no such discussion. I use the same exams in both sections, so asking about a topic we didn’t discuss would make the online group appear to learn less. I pondered that problem in the back of my head yesterday, and this morning woke up with an answer. Since I used twitter to communicate with my online course daily, I posted the same two prompts that I used in class Friday. While responding to some of the student responses, I ran across this article from today’s Washington Post, which provided some richness that neither the students nor I brought up online. And then it occurred to me that I should post the same article on the course website for my face-to-face section. I think this turned out to be a win, win for all of my students.
Image courtesy of Martin Weller via flickr
