Julia, Carol and I met f2f today to discuss our group project.  During our conversation we identified some common challenges in teaching COM 1010, which we feel may also point to opportunities for designing innovative hybrid assignments.  Particularly, we all felt strongly that walking students through organizing and supporting an argument, whether it be for an informative or a persuasive speech, is a critical component of the course.  As Julia noted, being able to internalize the form is necessary for students to later improvise and be creative with it.  Making arguments and constructing outlines of those arguments is also one of the places where students struggle the most/require the most guidance, and where we anticipate that experiementing with innovation and hybrid mechanisms could yield the most return.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to each propose an assignment that addresses the areas of gathering and organizing materials and critical thinking.   We will design the assignments separately, over the course of the next two days, with each group member describing their assignment’s timeframe, technologies, modes of evaluation, and relationship to the learning goals identified.  We’ll send the assignments to Julia, who will post them as our work-in-progress on Wednesday.  The second part of our project will be to provide feedback for each other on the assignments and to work through some of the implications, positive and negative, we see in incorporating these specific assignments into a hybrid course.  We are interested in both the possibilities and the risks of our designs, and in addressing shared perceived challenges.  Carol will post our revised assignments, with context, to the blog on Thursday.