I'm currently teaching an Honors College (HC) course this semester which I first taught last semester. Similar to another HC course I taught during fall 2018, I am utilizing a final project rather than a final exam in this new course. As before, I did not define exactly what they were to do for the final project, at least not in terms of structure or format.
I'm providing the students freedom to demonstrate their accumulated knowledge using whatever approach they chose, as long as they can justify it to me. To get them "thinking outside the box," last week during class I asked the students to form small groups and create a list of all of the possible ways they could imagine which could be used to exhibit and document knowledge and understanding. Each group then reported back to the class, with a group member recording their ideas on the white board. Shown in the pictures to the right are a couple of the lists that generated 68 unique ideas they thought of this semester. This far exceeds the 47 my fall 2018 students thought of, and more than doubles the 30 ideas students in the same course came up with last semester.
Final project: A tangible artifact that records your responses to the course’s essential questions, as it relates to your chosen major(s) and/or minor(s). This will be submitted in two draft iterations, with a third final submission. A brief in-class presentation is also expected.I could have simply required every student to write a paper and do a presentation. By being learner-centered and allowing each student to determine how they want to exhibit and document their learning during the course, the class and I will be exposed to a wonderful variety of presentations at the end of the semester. My prior experience also suggests that most students will take more ownership of their project than they likely would have of a paper. My firm belief is that if you give your students choice, and they will usually pleasantly surprise you with what they can do.
And our essential questions are:
- What is a computer?
- How do we use algorithms in our lives?
- How has the widespread use of computing technology and algorithms changed the way we work, play, and interact with other people? How much should we let technology do for us?
- What social and legal issues have arisen due to the widespread use of computing technology and algorithms? What new issues are likely to arise in the future?
Having done this activity three semesters, I was curious how the lists compared to each other, so I did a bit of analysis on the respective word lists. After standardizing word forms, etc, I ended up with a combined list of 108 unique words/phrases from the three semesters, including the nearly 70 from this semester. Eight words (7% of the list) showed up on all three semesters' lists.
- book
- dance
- debate
- game
- interview
- test
- theater
- write
Twenty more (19%) showed up two of the semesters: art, blog, brain scan, change, connection, demonstrate, experiment, explain, fashion, interpret, Kahoot!, meme, model, perform, poetry, present, reflect, song, teach, and website. The remaining eighty words/phrases (74%) were unique to one semester. The word cloud at the top of this post provides a visualization of the 108 words, with the size of a word indicating how many semesters that word was reported.
How do you prefer to exhibit and document your knowledge? How creative would you have been? Leave your response in the comments below.
Image credits:
Word cloud created with https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/
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