Yes, you read that title right: this is a re-revision of my Human-Computer Interaction course, which I wrote about revising back in early July. Since then, I learned that all my courses would be asynchronous online (after being told that we would almost certainly be able to do them with synchronous online meetings). As I mentioned in my game design revision notes, then, I have had to come back to the HCI course to figure out what to do about it.
Like basically all of my in-person course plans, my HCI course traditionally relies upon in-class activities to help students understand the concepts and build a community together. The original synchronous plans assumed that we would have time to work together, even if distributed physically. Removing that constraint meant that I had to revisit the design to make all the required conversations asynchronous, which means more formal structure around discussion board posts.
After some consternation, I decided to follow a model similar to what I am using in my game design course. I will set up small peer groups who are required to read and comment on each other's work, in the hopes that this not only helps students sharpen their skills but also build some community and get to know each other. I thought about adding a requirement that each group get together online to discuss the readings and work, which is something I've seen in a colleague's online graduate course, but I decided that I wanted to keep this in fairly small, contained steps.
Along those lines, I copied over and lightly edited some of the additional prose I have been adding to course plans back into the HCI one, including several paragraphs about commitment. This may be one of the hardest parts for the students. It has always been the case that I have designed my courses to take nine hours of effort per week, which some students struggle with anyway; without the valuable three contact hours per week of structure, discussion, rapid feedback, and encouragement, it is not clear to me how many of my students will be able to keep their heads above water. Yet, it seems to me to be the only honest option: if we're going to take their money for an education, and federal financial aid law makes these demands on the effort-hour-cost equivalency, we cannot pull back on expectations without a concomitant decrease in tuition and fees. Assuming I can keep my head above water, my plan is to record a short talking-head video each week to release to my students, talking about what excites me about their work and where I see challenges. I hope that will at least help them remember that I'm rooting for them.
I reviewed all my notes and did some additional research as part of my re-redesign, and I added two new elements to the course which I hope will work well with the distributed mode. I added several videos from Scott Klemmer's series of lectures based on his Stanford course. I watched a lot more of the series than I will be assigning. It certainly seems prudent to use his nicely polished videos rather than record inferior ones myself. Incorporating his content made me rethink the ordering of some of the topics I wanted to cover as well.
The other formal element I added was a requirement to complete the five-step OpenMind tutorials. I heard about these through Heterodox Academey I think, and this past week I took some time to actually go through them. There was nothing in it that I had not heard before, but I suspect there was quite a bit that my students would not have. Some of it is relatively simple contemporary psychology, such as the idea that the emotional system is fast and dominant but trainable (the riding-the-elephant metaphor). Other parts mix pragmatism and ethics, such as the importance of intellectual humility. Taken as a whole, I liked the presentation, my only major criticisms being that it starts on the wrong foot and has an imbalanced obsession with Buddhism. Knowing the unprecedented breakdowns of discourse in modern times, and how the Internet seems to be fueling the fire of ideological demonization, it seemed like the HCI course was a good place to inject some of this content. I am eager to hear what my students have to say about it.
We are less than two weeks from the start of classes, and I find myself nervous about the semester. I am grateful that I can do my work from home, but I am concerned about my students' experiences. I still don't really have a plan for how I will do anything like office hours aside from a passing fancy about livestreaming my course-related relevant work. At the same time, I've put in an unprecendented amount of effort this summer to revise my courses for Fall, and honestly, I feel like I could use a vacation, just as the meetings are kicking up for the semester's start.
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