Teaching Tuesday: Prepping Classes

My August is going to be hectic. I have professional and personal travel,  I’m looking ahead to a few new or heavily modified classes, and we have “upgraded” our learning management system to “Blackboard Ultra” which seems to feature fewer features and much more monitoring. So I decided to dedicate this week to course prep even though it is well in advance of the start of my semester.

There have been some interesting hiccups.

1. The End of the PDF. A few months ago, I mused about the consequences of our university’s current reading of accessibility guidelines which have pushed against the PDF as a suitable format for use in classes. This week, I discovered the Google’s Gemini AI engine is by far the best way to transcribe a PDF (of, say, a book chapter) into consistently formatted text. I can then drop it into a Word document to share with students. The downside is that Gemini doesn’t do much with footnotes. If the book chapter includes footnotes (and these are relevant to what I want the students to understand), I have to use ABBYFine OCR to turn the PDF into a Word document. This is much more work.

2. The Elegance of the Wiki. For years, I built my survey classes (Western Civilization I and World Civilizations I) around a wiki-style interface where groups of students would collaborate to write textbook chapters (or modules that supplement an existing textbook) on various topics. The Wiki function allowed various members of the group to update the page relatively easily, despite the rather clunky interface. One of the small features that I made consistent use of was the ability to add threaded comments to the page. This gave me and members of the class space to comment on the work.

Of course, Blackboard Ultra does not include the Wiki feature. This is means I’m going to have to either find a kluge or figure out if one of the new features can serve the same function. 

3. Less is More. I’m continuously revising my historical methods course and trying to bring it into sync not only with the changing character of our capstone course. I’m also working to make it a bit less intense. Historically, our majors would declare rather late, often between their sophomore and junior years, and I could pitch my 200 level (mid-level) course quite high. Now, more majors declare as freshmen or sophomores meaning that have not only fewer history courses under their belt, but also a bit less substantial intellectual foundation. As a result, I’ve cut some of the more challenging sections from my class and built in more foundational work focused both on fundamental research skills and on the practices that will serve them well in upper level courses and eventually their capstone.

The challenge for me is cutting some of the more abstract conversations about the nature of history as a field. These are the more entertaining aspects of the course to me (and often to the students who don’t encounter opportunities to think deeply about how we know anything about the past at all), but as the old saying goes “kill your darlings” and that’s what I’m doing. It’s not fun, but the class might be better for it.