Foraging Blog for PSY 101

I decided to go with PSY 101 as my text free course. I have been thinking about it for a couple of years, but really got inspired by Lara and her enthusiasm to go textbook free. My goals for the course are for students to learn how to use the Internet to find academic sources and be able to sift through all of the information that is out there and finding legitimate, scholarly sites. I think the biggest challenge of going textbook free was figuring out what to teach them and where to get the information. After thinking, surfing, trying, collecting, sifting, and filtering through scads of information and ideas, I finally figured out that the best place to start would be the course objectives. I had to step away from the table of contents in a book, and move to the objectives of the course. I used the 2013 Tuning Report of marketing and psychology competencies and student learning outcomes (google it for the report). This was developed by the Midwestern Higher Education Compact that involved a faculty team from a variety of institutions in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri. This report was funding by the Lumina Foundation and was probably the best "starting place" (outside of my course brief). I also found the Society for Teaching Psychology to be a wonderful resource (http://teachpsych.org/). Whatever subject area you are looking for, you may find a source similar to this one.

The next step, I had to develop my schedule. What was I going to teach and how long should I spend on each topic? That my friends, is going to be a guessing game for the fall, but with all of the resources available, I will always have a couple of other classroom activities up my sleeve in case students get through the day's topic/activity/discussion quicker than anticipated.

My favorite sites:
www.oercommons.org I like the case study teaching pedagogy for psychology. It allows application of information and makes it relevant for students.

www.vtstutorial.co.uk This is going to be our first assignment. It is a tutorial for students that teaches them how to work through information on the Internet and distinguish between good (academic) and bad (some one's biased opinion) information. If you are going to require students to go find information on their own, you first need to teach them how to do this.

This is an exciting process and I could go on and on, but I will start working on putting my course together and get back to you in a few weeks.