Week 5 and I'm Still Alive!

Well, I am in week 5 of my first textbook free semester, and I am keeping my head above water (Linda Lee...write that down for our conference presentation). I gathered so much material over the summer, that now I am sifting through what I really want to use about 2 weeks ahead of schedule. I am starting to use a lot of case studies (National Center for Case Study Teaching). They are great classroom group activities, come with answer keys, and teacher's notes. I strongly encourage you to check these out. They have case studies for all disciplines.

At this point I have two three ring binders. The one that has EVERYTHING (well, everything after the first clean out) and the second binder is for only the stuff I have used and it works. One lesson I learned is sometimes students need much more direction. For example, I had this great idea of having each group put together a historical time line for Psychology and then we could talk about them. They were suppose to select at least 15 things to go on the time line and tell the class why they thought it was important to include. So each group went out on the Internet with their iPad minis and put together their time line. Well, did you know that some 19 year old students believe that when the first organization for psychology was developed in England is important to include? Wow...I didn't realize how diverse their selections would be. So I had to modify for the next class. I gave them items that were important in the history of psychology and they had to research them to find out why. MUCH better!

The last thing I would like to let you in on, is this has definitely taken me out of my comfort zone. Directing them to find information is much different than telling them the information. For the most part I think it is going well. The only data I can give you right now is at week four in Fall 2013, I had already lost about 10% of my students. This semester, I have lost 2%. I started with 50 students and used to use a textbook that cost approximately $40. So going textbook free, I have saved students $2000 of upfront textbook costs. Could you imagine if I had been using a $200 text (which we do have in our psych dept.)? That would have been a savings of $10,000 alone...in 2 classes for ONE semester.

In closing, even though I feel like a fish out of water (write that one down too Linda), it is a much more interesting class for me because it is different with every group of students. With that being said, in honor of this program, I would like to leave you with some sounds of whales.

Knee Deep in Ideas!

Well I have been going through the tons of ideas I have found both online and in instructor's manuals to select what I want to do during each class. I am a bit nervous because I don't know how long it will take to go through many of these critical thinking activities, but I think I have plenty of back ups just in case. I think the hardest about this is narrowing down the notebook full of ideas for the semester.

One of the neat things I found in an Open Resource Site was case studies that were specific to a number of disciplines. http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/ You just have to do a search for your area. They come with answers and teacher's notes once you join. This is probably one of my favorite finds.

I also decided to use Psy 101 podcasts from iTunes University. I am creating a study guide for students to fill out as they listen. I think this will ease their anxiety about no book and it will also save classroom time of finding the info. They are only around an hour and a half, and they will listen to one a week, so it is becoming a traditional flip.

Well, back to work!

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.