Course Redesign - Sociology 101

Through the THREAD grant, our team has been educated in all the possibilities of WebCT, having received excellent hands-on training. As part of our training, we drafted rough templates for SOC 101 courses and familiarized ourselves with a wide variety of net resources that can be implemented with WebCT. Additionally, we became familiar with audio-visual and multi-media components that we may utilize.

Professor Gottschalk plans to use WebCT as part of his SOC 101 class (Introduction to Sociology) which typically serves anywhere from 30 to 150 students. For Gottschalk, WebCT accomplishes 5 different purposes:

1. administrating exams, communicating grades, and commenting on students' performance;
2. providing students with easy access to class-pertinent material on the web;
3. keeping students informed about important dates, readings, and assignments schedules;
4. organizing students into discussion groups in which they will be asked to answer various questions and accomplish assignments; and
5. providing students with an informal space where they will be able to communicate together about class material.

Professor Wray is using the training he received to roll out a web based teaching component in his Fall 2002 course sociology 471/671 Race and Ethnic Relations in the United States. Wray utilizes a WebQuest model to help students develop and hone web based research skills, as both individual and team researchers. The site currently hosts two digital video clips and will continue to grow as Wray adds digital streaming audio clips currently in development.

Wray will launch a WebCT assisted course, Sociology 101: Introduction to Sociology, in Spring 2003. The course will be based in part on the design schema developed during the THREAD. training workshops during the summer of 2002, and will include

Professor Brents is using WebCT as a supplement to her Introduction to Sociology course SOC 101.7 this semester. The course has 60 students. Brents is using Web CT mainly to encourage students to discuss class materials in online discussion groups. She has divided the class into three groups and each group has been given two online discussion assignments to complete in the course of the semester. These assignments require viewing some online material as well as discussing questions that I ask.

Brents has also put a space on WebCT for students to engage in their own self initiated discussions in their groups on an ongoing basis throughout the semester and is also using WebCT as a repository for the syllabus, using the calendar feature, for grades and for some content.

Thus far in the semester, Brents reports, the discussions seem to be going very well. Some students are diving in and doing lots of discussion, while others are a little slow. It already is much more discussion and more personalized discussion than is possible in a large class format.

In short, the THREAD. program has provided our team and our department with an excellent set of tools and resources as we begin to move more and more of our course content to the web. We are confident that, through our example, preservice teachers in our courses can and will have the opportunity to learn the value and techniques of adding web based learning strategies to their teaching portfolios.

View Proposals:

• Barb Brents, Simon Gottschalk & Matt Wray [PDF]