I’m just preparing for the last class of Mobile Workforce Technologies and am trying to reflect on what came out of it this year. Each time we run this course, it’s different. But I don’t think we have fully achieved the aim of building the text book for the course, yet. It’s getting close. I think there are a few more pieces of structure that need to be in place for it to happen. I hesitate to add too much structure, because it’s the very unstructured nature of the course that can be so powerful for student learning.
The table of contents concept that I’ve used for the last two versions of the course has started to come together, but it’s still a fairly incoherent attempt by students to organise the information. I think it may be that as it’s currently structured, deciding on a topic and getting the information seems to be the limit to what students produce. The contents page ended up as an alphabetised list of topics until I put a bit of structure onto the page and students started filling in the blank. I need to come up with a way of getting students to undertake the task of organising what they make.
Perhaps the process, the assessment, could include marks towards organising information whereby students must contribute to the contents page and provide a summary for at least one article as well as contributing to a discussion about how best to structure the topics. This is a possibility, but I’m concerned that a few committed students would take on the task before anyone else had a chance.
Or, what if there was a forum where multiple people could write a synopsis for a page and then everyone vote on the best one, which then gets added to the contents. This would give students opportunity for creating the synopsis and engaging with other student’s work in a deeper, more reflective way. Hmm, will have to see how I can put that in the requirements.