There is some misunderstanding about the differences between online and face-to-face classes. Before you start filling your head with the pros and cons of either medium, I want to you think about how the line between the two is blurring. The other night I was in class when the professor made a reference to a story he had read pertaining to the topic. Almost immediately, students were scouring the Internet for the story. Some found the story and read it. Some found the story and read related articles. Others, well, they were chatting with their classmates two seats down. This is the new traditional classroom. A sort of guided discovery, if you will.
Emerging Powers in the Graduate Liberal Studies program is a step towards the new traditional. The Emerging Powers Blog connects students with the outside world to discuss course-related topics, course specific RSS feeds that pull in stories from which the student can determine relevance, videos that pit experts against one another, interactive visuals and case studies, and a chat tool to allow students to debate in real time.
The kicker is the final product—A research article that is published to Wikipedia. Ok, I’m not a fan of using Wikipedia as a reference in scholarly work, but I am a fan of criticism. Think about it. You work all semester on a project and submit it to your instructor, and sometimes your entire class. What’s that—30 people? Maybe a couple hundred if you’re in a lecture class. Now imagine the value of putting your project out for the entire world to critique.
I’ll be honest. If you’re a traditional student who likes a warm chair, a classroom full of students, and the sounds of an instructor’s lecture, then this course ain’t for you. I, on the other hand, am not one of those students. I don’t want to take a course that I could have Googled. I don’t want to be in a classroom where no one challenges the opinions of their peers or their instructor. I want discussions to be confrontations. I want to be inspired. I want to learn. I want the new traditional.
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