Author: Amita

So I have some take aways after weeks of thought on what my teaching artifact will be as a result of this seminar. I now have two artifacts, or atleast I hope they will be considered thus so.

1. Teaching in chunks for the statistical review section of the course. I have decided I am not re-teaching the pre-requisite topics for my course. These first two weeks will instead be briefings and not lecture. Students will be asked to prepare a discussion on topics I will assign to them via groups. Each session, 20 minutes will be dedicated to discussing the briefings. Lets hope I don’t have dead air for 20 minutes. To support them in their preparation for the briefings, I have built a course site on BB (and will possibly move this to blogs@Baruch at some point) with references to OER on the review topics. Students will be assigned to groups in the first week, so they can work with their groups on developing the briefings.
2. Typically I assign groups project in week 5. By then students have developed some rapport among themselves and have gotten to know their classmates. I allow them to select their own groups, with the offer to assign students to a group if they are unable to find a group to join (i understand some students don’t get a chance to connect with their classmates when a class is completely online). So far, students have been really good about setting themselves up in groups and I have rarely had to help out with the assignment. Now since I am asking them to forms groups after day1, I have to help them out with getting to know their class mates. For which meaningful ice breakers are useful. The emphasis being on meaningful. After taking Ron Whitman’s workshop on “Work it, Own It” I intend to use his ice breaker. I think it has some many unintended benefits, (or maybe intended by design). Students are encouraged to understand what engagement in a class really means, and have to go though some amount of self-reflection and self assessment of how well they engage.

Wish me luck!

I am teaching a new course that is being introduced by the department this Fall to all business school students as a business core course. I am still in the throes of understanding how students are entering this course and how well they are prepped to receive this content. The primary take away is they are weak in their pre-requisite knowledge, and this is creating a bottleneck in terms of keeping up with my course schedule.

The teaching artifact I’d like to work on is teaching in chunks, and making my teaching more a briefing and less a lecture. This is particularly relevant since the first few weeks of my course syllabus is designed to be a review of their pre-requisite course (statistics) of which my students remember nada. Which means a two week statistics review ends up becoming a 4 week re-teach of statistics.

However I am trying to work out what is keeping students from engaging during the class sessions. Do my expectations of engagement need to be re-set? Thinking in progress…

1. Hi! Nice meeting you! Could you introduce yourself? What department are you from? What courses are you teaching or have been teaching? What are the classes you teach like, such as format or class size? Is there anything you want to tell us about your teaching, research, or other projects? 
   My name is Amita Singh. I teach courses in the Management Department at Zicklin. This semester I am teaching two online synchronous courses: Operations Management with 45 students, and a quantitative methods course on Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics with 79 students.
   
2. Could you talk a little bit about that course you’ll be working on during this seminar? 
   I will be focusing on the quantitative methods course. This is a required course for all BBA students, and is being offered for the first time to the students this Fall.
   
3. What are the listed learning goals of your course? They could be ones provided by the department, or ones that you have written for your syllabus? Please list them (pasting is fine!).
   The goal for this course is help students develop quantitative reasoning skills necessary for success in business. Throughout the course, students will build quantitative literacy skills through writing about analytics, model building, and interpreting quantitative information to understand and use data in managerial decisions.
   
4. What class materials are you planning to develop? What goals do you have for them?
   I would like to develop a way to get students to refresh their pre-requisite foundational concepts in statistics without taking up 4 weeks of the course time.