Share Your Assignments

The best part of working at CETLOE is having regular opportunities to talk to other teachers about what they are doing in the classroom. I change what I am doing in my classes almost every semester based on conversations with faculty and grad students about new assignments, strategies, and content they are trying out. During the pandemic, I feel like I haven’t had as many chances to do this because I’m not running into other teachers at the coffee shop or in the office, but I wonder if this has to be the case. With our classes online, most of us are collecting, curating, and creating a massive amount of content and figuring out how to meaningfully deliver it to students in a new way. As we learn how to do this effectively, we are building libraries of digital content that could make it easier to share and have discussions around this material.

Our syllabi and assignments have, of course, been digital for a long time and many departments have been collecting and making these available as models for other teachers. But the pandemic has forced us to create far more digital content than most of us would have done otherwise and to consider how this material can be used in a modular way. Once again, in some ways this is nothing new. We have all pulled out a reading from week 5 and replaced it with other content. But if we began to think of this material as an evolving library that can readily be integrated into our classes, we could more easily share content with teachers in our own and other departments. If I am teaching W.E.B. DuBois in my American Literature survey course, I would love to see the short video lecture or discussion board prompts that colleagues in the English Department have developed or collected, or material from faculty in Sociology, History, and African-American Studies.

As many faculty do, I worry about a less rosy version where all the online material we are creating is just gobbled up by institutions furthering the trend of courses taught by overworked and underpaid instructors with no job security. The fact is we are creating more and more online content and probably getting better at it, so while we have reasons to worry about the implications of doing so, we could also be benefiting from this work. I’m guessing most of us are thinking about how we can use the new material we are collecting and creating for future classes, whether they are online or face to face. What if we could easily pull not just from our own material, but from our colleagues as well?       

At a basic level, we can already do this. And many already are. CETLOE and some departments set up workshops and discussions around course content and approaches, where ideally we find a community of teachers that we can bounce ideas off of and share material. The pandemic has made it unsafe to do this in traditional face-to-face gatherings, but we are working on online versions. While WebEx meetings are not the same as in person, and we shouldn’t expect them to be, we could take advantage of all the deliberately digital material we are creating because of the pandemic. In the past, I have worked with faculty to create online collections of assignments. One example, Teaching Atlanta, gathers course materials focused on our city and allows teachers to search by instructor, discipline, or institution. As a part of the Experiential, Project-based, Interdisciplinary Curriculum (EPIC) program, we are beginning to build a similar library of interdisciplinary course materials, with a particular focus on connecting core classes. I’ve also heard that the USG is building a library of materials already in iCollege, making it even easier to directly bring material created by other instructors into our own classes. These and other initiatives will necessarily evolve over time, and I look forward to see how the teaching communities we already have help shape and use these resources.