Today’s blog post (remember I challenging myself to write one blog post each weekday for a month) isn’t on this blog, but rather it’s an article at Wired Campus on how we used student-created video content to create a learning community in the online calculus course I taught this summer. I invite you to go check it out.

Some side notes about what the article is about:

• The student video presentations were really the highlight of the course for me. I love how they did a lot of different things for us – they provided more worked-out examples for students, they provided more evidence to me that students had learned the material, and really you can’t underestimate the value of seing a face and hearing a voice in creating a community.
• I’m not kidding when I said it’s hard to create a learning community in an online class that has no synchronous meetings. Probably that’s the hardest thing I encounted in online teaching.
• I think the video presentations would be equally valuable in a face-to-face course. I am encouraging my discrete structures students to do this as a way to demonstrate evidence of their Learning Community participation.
• I also think this could be a way to bring inquiry-based learning to an online course, although I haven’t really thought hard about that.

I’ll be contributing about one article a month to Wired Campus from here on out, so look for the next one in a few weeks.