17. Final Project: Creating a Unit
In creating lessons for your students, there are several questions that you need to consider.
How much material will you include in a typical unit?
On one hand, if your units or assignments are spaced too closely, you lose some of the advantages of the flexibility of online courses. Space
assignments too far apart, and students may put off work until the last minute and have to great a volume of material to cover. In my experience,
breaking down a syllabus into topics that cover approximately the equivalent of one or two week of a face-to-face class seems to work the best. In the
sample unit I have included in the sub-pages below, I have shown you what a one week unit of my OSG Genetics course looks like.
Exactly HOW much material is appropriate for one unit?
One of the most surprising things to me, as I started teaching online courses, is that an online lecture is generally shorter than the equivalent F2F
class. In general I have found that the material that I would cover in a 40 minute period in my classes, could be covered in a 20 minute online
voicethread lecture. In fact in my courses I call my voicethreads "mini-lectures" to put students initially at ease in watching lectures online. For
example, in my sample unit, you will see that I have three mini-lectures of material. These will take students approximately 90 minutes to watch and
take notes. The remaining time during the week is spent doing reading assignments, practice problems, discussion posts, working with partners on a
project, and completing a weekly assessment. It is important to keep in mind the time spent on all of the various things you are asking your students
to do in a week.
What different kinds of assignments and assessments have you included in a unit?
Just as it is a good idea to include multiple modalities and learning styles in a face-to-face course, you should consider varying the types of
assignments and presentation media within your course. But be careful to also consider consistency. If everything the students see is different, your
course may lose coherency. This link, from the Illinois Online Network, contains some great lesson and activity ideas specifically designed for online
courses.
What is your style/layout?
It can take some time to find a layout and style that works for you. By creating a consistent layout, your students will know what to expect from each
lesson and unit, and will know where to find the materials that they need. For example, you can see in my sample pages, that I order the pages of a
unit by topic. Then within each page, students will follow the content chronologically down a page, doing each assignment in order. Other teachers
may place all information of content in one column, and then all assignments in another column. Whatever style you choose, consistency from week
to week is key.
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19. My Final Project 2
1.View the three videos on the right. They are from the National Geographic documentary, Guns, Germs, and
Steel by Jared Diamond. The running time for the three videos will be about 25:00.
2.You will want to pause the video at times so you can answer the following questions in your personal journal on
the right:
- Yali's Question: "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we
black people had little cargo of our own?"
- Why did some civilizations turn to sedentary food production and abandon their hunter-gatherer roots?
- According to Diamond, what are the critical factors that led to food production and domestic societies?
3. When you have finished viewing the video and answering the questions in your personal journal, create a
thoughtful, one paragraph post in the class blog answering the following: What is the fundamental difference
between the Landes and Diamond theories of economic inequality, and how do both theories benefit the West?
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