Kipling as Anthropologist of Empire

This is the first fully online course I have taught, though I have used blended elements in other courses for several years.  Because the students are mature individuals who work full time, asynchronous learning was an obvious place to go.  What I decided to do was to recreate the MWF model in an on line format.

The Collab integrated syllabus tool, UVA's instance of Sakai, allows me to create an interface where the entire course exists on one page: and each week's reading assignments and writing tasks are presented in a clear and logical matrix. Having started with an asynchronous design in mind, I chose to use Kipling's short stories as the core assignments; these work particularly well for this format because I was able to have each one I assigned scanned as a discrete PDF file. I was also able to have the novel which they read over the last three weeks of the course scanned as one larger PDF as well (all of the material is out of copyright so there is no issue there). One major but ancillary benefit to the students is that with the entire course available online as PDF files there are no books to buy, and this saves them money.

The first week of the course students undertook a group building exercise, discussing positive and negative experiences they have had in education. This gave them the opportunity to be supportive of each other and to build a community separate from the course material. Each one of them was also given the task of creating a mini “My Space” profile for himself or herself and this allowed their personalities to come out very early on. One real benefit of this model is that this community includes students from all three of our sites (Norther Virginia, Charlottesville, and the Tidewater of Virginia) so people literally several hundred miles distant from each other have the opportunity to be a part of the same community: this is very good for student morale and makes the students from sites other than Charlottesville feel more engaged with the greater University.

I use the 'Discussion' tool to conduct the vast majority of the course. Here is how the ten week core of the course functions:

Each Monday morning I record a lecture and post it to the Syllabus as an MP3 file. The students can download the file to portable players and listen to it multiple times. The assigned readings for the week are are available from the beginning of the course and the students either read them before or after listening to the lecture. Each student then writes a 350 word Critical Response to my lecture and the readings on a topic I assign in the lecture. The students post these Responses on Wednesday evening. Everyone reads all of the Critical Responses. By Friday evening each student is required to peer review (formally in academic writing) the CR of three fellow students. These peer review assignment rotate on a matrix so that each person reviews different students on successive weeks and will review most of his or her peers twice.

The peer reviews are incredibly valuable: they have proven to be both constructive and demanding. The peers see things in student writing that I may not have seen, and at times point out strengths which I may not have recognized (likewise they are sometimes more harsh than I am and in justifiable ways).

In the second week I provide written feedback to all 18 students (which though incredibly time consuming paid strong dividends in the quality of student work in the subsequent weeks). Following that I provide some more detailed feedback to six students per week: so each student will receive written feedback four times over ten weeks. I send the feedback vial email, and I will send short comments as I wish to make them in between the formal rotation. Furthermore, because I am writing an email with unbounded space, I can be much more detailed than it is possible for me to be when I am writing in the margins of a student paper. These feedback emails usually produce a response or a question which I respond to in turn: so I strongly feel I am in contact with the class on a rolling basis.

I hold on line office hours every Thursday from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Elluminate Live! just as if I were sitting in my office: I merely do it wearing a headset.

What has me enthused the most about this course, and what I tell colleagues about the most, is the fact that those students who might be the quiet ones in the back rows do not have the option to either be quiet or sit in the back: everyone must speak equally every week, and everyone's work is in the spotlight--furthermore, neither can one or two students dominate the discussion. The students have chosen avatar photographs, so everyone can create an identity. Because we are in a live dialog each week, I feel no less connected to these students than I do students I see in the traditional class setting: and I find that making them write and review every single week gives them more contact with me and each other than the traditional live setting.

Because the students are writing each week, their ideas and interpretations become a part of my vision of the material much more quickly, and I am already (in the fourth week of the core of the course) giving lectures that I would not have conceived of six weeks ago.

In the final three weeks of the course the students will write a term paper on The Light That Failed and they will have to discuss their ideas with me twice through email or in office hours. Because of the digital age, and because they will be researching using the MLA database their secondary sources will be available on line as well.

The course has made me feel strongly energized about the digital age, and the platforms it provides for teaching.