jsloan

Jennifer Sloan

Course: Racial & Ethnic Relations (Soc 211)

I’ve been using Blackboard for my courses thus far and have found it to be a useful way to organize information for myself and the students. All of my course materials are on Blackboard (syllabus, assignments, grades) and students submit assignments electronically. I use a lot of content that is available on the web (articles, videos, etc.) and I’ve found that students appreciate having this material available in a centralized location. Having the course hosted online helps me with organization as well. I split my time between 3 locations (and home!) so having materials available online / backed up somewhere is essential in case I forget to bring something with me. (I can also grade assignments online so there’s no need for me to lug around extra papers.)

In the future, I’d like to expand the online reach of my course to include more discussions. I’d also like students to bring in more information from outside of the classroom and apply it to the concepts being studied in class. Using Blackboard, Wikis, or another LMS will be useful for these purposes. I’d like to develop a class blog where students demonstrate and apply the knowledge from class to discuss current events. Ideally this class blog will be a place where students can freely discuss the concepts from the course and voice their opinions on a particular topic without feeling restrained by the classroom setting. I’ve found it to be somewhat challenging to get students to discuss controversial topics in class; I hope that in an online forum where students have more time to compose their thoughts that more (all!) students will join in course discussions.