Reflections at the End of My First Course

Well, I just finished teaching my first in-class course at Conestoga College . In my first semester I only taught Mixed Learning (think structured self study) so I never physically taught in the classroom (only proctored). Overall, I am very pleased with how the course turned out. But, let's start at the beginning.

I was asked to teach the course the Friday before it started (on Tuesday), and only received the textbook and course outline that Monday. The course was on Adobe InDesign which is desktop publishing software. I remember being in a huge rush to get something thrown together (as I had nothing) for the first night.

I was nervous about teaching at the College. For the last year I had been studying and preparing myself to teach in a High School; now I was teaching adults in Continuing Education. I have taught adults before, but never in a course of this length (usually weekend First Aid courses). I was worried that all the pedagogy I had learned wouldn't apply. Turns out I was wrong.

Because the course was not already prepared for me (as they usually are at the College), I decided to work with the students to decide what we would cover in the latter half of the course (after the midterm). This went very well. We also completely reworked the final two assignments combining them into one project. Finally, we converted the final exam into a presentation, where the students could share their projects and their learning with the class. That just happened a few hours ago and it went splendidly. I was nervous about broaching the idea of presentations to the group, and although there were some reservations, everyone was on board. Now, I am glad I chose to bring it up in class.

I used my class wiki from my mixed learning classes last semester. It ended up being used mainly as a static, teacher updated website. A few additions were made by students in the early weeks, but that did not carry forward. I realize now I made two mistakes with it: I should have spent a bit of time each class explaining how to use it as a wiki; and I should have set time in class for students to contribute to it, thus letting them get used to the idea. I was toying with assigning contributions to the wiki (i.e. giving it marks), but I'm on the fence. I don't like to force people to do something they may not want to, but sometimes we need that to begin using something new. I guess I force them to do assignments and tests, so why not using the wiki. Wikis are more fun anyway!

I would like to incorporate more collaborative learning in my next courses. I was nervous to deviate from a directed learning approach as my past experiences with adult education had indicated that approach worked best. However, based on tonight's success, I may have need to reevaluate my past observations.

I have also been pondering the idea of having my students complete real work for real companies (for free of course). I tried to make my assignments as realistic and useful as possible, but in design, nothing beats working for a real client. I've never done this before, so I really don't know where to begin. I also want to work on not talking so much. I'd love to talk only in 5 minute segments and then only for 4-5 of those. I'm just not sure how to do that with teaching application software where so much of the lesson is working through how to use the software.

I already have some ideas for incorporating Twitter and Wordle into my next classes (on the programming language Python and a course on Database Design). I'll post some of those ideas in a future posting. But for now I must be off to bed. I've got a couple of interviews on Thursday so I need my beauty sleep.