Organizing Modules

Now that you have all those ideas swarming around in your head, it is time to get organized. While you could write the statements discussed below on a physical notepad, it will be beneficial for you to write these out on a word processiing program, even if it is something simple like Notepad ©. That way you can transfer the material easily to Blackboard.

What do you want them to learn?

Goals
You know that you want your students to learn to love the subject you are teaching; you also know that this may be overly idealistic. What are the practical realities here? What course description is given in the academic catalogue? Given the situation of your students in this course, what hopes do you have for them? Write up your goals in paragraph format. These goals will help to shape your expectations regarding outcome competencies.

Outcome competencies
If your academic division supplies you with a list of outcome competencies for the course you are teaching, this is a great place to start. Otherwise, you will need to develop competencies based on your previous teaching experience. It is important that the outcome competencies be measurable. Students will not have the advantage of sizing up your expectations by watching you in class. You need to be explicit. I will use my own discipline to illustrate.

A laudable goal for a course in biblical interpretation would be for the students to feel confident about interpreting all but the most obscure biblical books. But to state this as an outcome competency would leave the students wondering, "How are you going to grade how confident I feel? How extensive does the interpretation have to be? What counts as obscure?" The task here is to find a way to measure the student's interpretative abilities. Think in terms of:
  • what behavior is expected
  • the degree to which it should be exhibited
  • how the measurement will be made
A couple of reasonable outcome competencies might be listed as follows.
"By the end of the term, the student should be able to
  • write a three-paragraph essay within thirty minutes on a biblical passage previously studied in class, without use of references, giving a valid historical setting, summary of literary aspects, and theological observation.
  • develop within two weeks an original Sunday school lesson outline designed for a one-hour class on any biblical passage of ten or more verses using library and online resources.
It is a lot harder to write measurable outcome competencies than to write goals. But once you have written them, you will have a clearer idea of the types of assignments that will be appropriate for your course.

How do you want them to learn?

Remember all that brainstorming? Now it is time to match up your outcome competencies with the kinds of activities which will prepare the students to succeed in the course. If I want my students to achieve the first competency listed above, here is an assignment that I might make:

In your small group examine Jeremiah 31:27-34. Divide up the research responsibilities to determine: historical setting, consistency with the rest of the book, literary patterns, semantic and grammatical observations, and connections with the New Testament. Post your findings on a forum of your group discussion board. Each member of the group must read the findings of the other group members and post a statement of theological implications for this passage. You have two weeks to complete this assignment.

Realize that you willl not likely use all of the ideas that you brainstormed. That's OK--you can save them for the next course you develop.

How do you want to present the activities?

List all of the assignments that you developed. Do some of the assignments build on the skills learned earlier in the course? Do some of the assignments repeat a behavior? You may want to group assignments in a way that gives the students a manageable view of the requirements. In Blackboard, you can list assignments individually or place them in a folder. Here is a sample from a course of mine. Some of the items are individual assignments and others are gathered in folders. Clicking on the folder name opens a new page which lists individual assignments.

It is useful to group the assignments in modules. When students complete a module, they sense that they are making progress. The modules may be set up to reflect the chronology of the course (e.g., eleven modules, one to be completed each week) or the structure of the area of investigation (e.g, a module on geography, customs, and culture of biblical lands; another on grammar and syntax; etc.)

A word about discussion boards

For online courses the discussion board is the primary area where students get to hear each others ideas and discoveries. One forum in a discussion board will probably be a place for you to post questions for the students to answer. But don't stop there. Forums can be used in a number of ways. You might want to set up a forum in which the students must comment on topics from their readings. Rather than pose specific questions, you might simply ask the students to comment on a topic; let them tell you (and the rest of the class) what struck them as important or applicable.

If you set up a discussion board "help desk," you might want to have a forum where you give the answers and one where students can help each other. It is also useful to set up a "Miscellaneous" forum that allows for the informal chatter you would expect to happen in the hallways of a traditional class. And you might want to have an "Observations" forum in which students can comment on the ways that the course materials interact with their life circumstances.

If you divide the class into small groups, each group should have its own discussion board. (This can be set up easily in Blackboard under "Manage Groups" in the Control Panel.) You can monitor these to observe the degree of participation of each student and to advise the group should it become obvious that they are struggling.