Ling's Teaching Reflection

Students in this course are from 4-5 refugee camps. Each week there's an activity called "Onsite Sharing." Here's an example for week 1: Form pairs—and share important information about your life and experiences (Only share what you are comfortable sharing). Each partner should take notes during the sharing—then each partner will introduce his or her classmate to the whole group at your location. Carefully read the Syllabus for this course. Then share your expectations for this course in small groups. Expectations are knowledge and skills you would like to learn during this course. Challenges are the difficulties that you will need to overcome to succeed in this course. Make a list of expectations and challenges. Using the Assignment tab on the left, post to the Assignment titled Week 1: Onsite Participation by Tuesday. Each week, there's a synchronous component built into the course. Students from the same camp will get together for a fixed amount of time...

I taught Bridge to Learning, an orientation course of the Jesuit Wide Learning program from September to October, 2019. This course was hosted on BlackBoard by Georgetown University. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to navigate the course. There was no learning curve for me at all to use the platform as an Instructor. In each blog posting, I'm going to reflect on one aspect of the course. Easy navigation. Each week starts with a student checklist pdf document. Each section below that starts with an action verb: Read -- Reading materials View -- watch a video or presentation Engage -- Onsite sharing Discuss - Online discussion questions Reflect -- Journal reflection (only visible to the instructor) I found this to be a more effective design than most of the Regis' courses. Content chunking breaks each week's content into manageable pieces. Students are less likely to be lost in a sea of information.