The first week or so

The first two weeks or so of this internship have been extraordinarily busy. For my internship I am redesigning a course that is taught to undergraduates who want to be teachers. The course is numbered EDPY 401 and is called Learners & Diversity but is really an introductory educational psychology survey course. I am teaching it in conjunction with my doctoral program.

So far I have spent a lot of time on technical support issues. I'm learning that undergraduate students can have the tendency to not be terribly self-sufficient and are willing to send an email asking for help without really trying to solve a problem first on their own. I suspect this is a product of their K-12 experience and higher education probably exacerbates the problem. This makes me curious how they will be when they get into a classroom and are on their own.

I am intentionally designing the course using new tools, so I installed Wordpress Multi-User on my personal server. This is a self-hosted blogging software that allows multiple people to have blogs on the same network. I set each student up with a blog publishing only their first names and last initial when needed. You can see these blogs at www.edpy401.com. I registered that domain name just for this course.

Once I got the blogs set up I recorded a screencast detailing how to log in. It is a fairly simply process and I embedded the video into the class blog. I'm disturbed by how many people can't watch a simple Flash video, though. Flash is standard operating equipment (YouTube, anyone?) so it pains me to see them having trouble with something so simple. I did provide a link to the .mov file though, so that has helped a few.

I then went to work on my presentations, taking into account my 793 multimedia project (http://793mmp.pbwiki.com) and cognitive load theory. The theory speaks loudly to classroom educators and is applicable to presentation design and content delivery. I have designed two presentations so far using my newly developed cognitive load theory inspired techniques and I like them a lot. I think they are clean, they are low on extraneous load, and support germane load.

Here is a sample slide for when I ask them to introduce themselves: (you can click on it to see it larger)



I've also been designing assessments using eInstruction's CPS system, which I am going to borrow from my middle school and bring with me to the University for class meetings. I chose to go this route since I don't have iClicker software or a receiver.

So far I feel like the work I have done has lots of value and will serve the course well. My intention is to create a turnkey course that is rigorous while reducing the workload on the graduate assistants who will be teaching the course in future semesters. If they grasp my presentation style and assessment techniques, their time grading papers will be reduced significantly and their satisfaction with the teaching position should increase substantially.