Reading List Course Format

Reading List Course Format

by Tracy Gustilo -
Number of replies: 7
Moodle is great! Thanks for making this available. I'm going to be implementing it to keep track of our homeschool =) and also, in a separate incarnation, on my website:

http://www.classicalco-op.com

which serves the classical education community.

As for a new course format, I'd like to see some sort of "Reading List" idea, where the course to be followed is basically to read a list of books (or selections). One would want to keep track of an original (planned) list, maybe with options (read this or that), and then follow up on the reading, with journaling and/or discussion (with other readers or a teacher/mentor) and/or keep a sort of annotated bibliography as a permanent record.

I'm not sure how this would work as a class, because different people might be reading different books. Maybe each course of reading would be assigned to an individual student, but then it would be hard to have any discussion in a community of readers.

thoughtful Dunno how you would do this exactly, but it would be great to have some sort of simple implementation for the time being. Maybe one could tweak the topic-based format, making each topic a book or reading assignment. Hmm.

Tracy
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In reply to Tracy Gustilo

Re: Reading List Course Format

by Martin Dougiamas -
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I think the topic format as it is would be very well suited for this - each 'topic' covers one or more readings, with associated forums, journals, assignments etc.

There is a specific type of forum that might be useful - the "each person posts one discussion" forum, in which, funnily enough, each person starts one discussion. Your intro could specify that each person write a review of the reading to start a thread, and ask them to reply to several other discussions.

Think of some focus questions as specific activities (eg "relate the reading to your own professional practice").
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Reading List Course Format

by Tracy Gustilo -
Yes... I can see how that would work for a class of people all reading the same thing. But what if you wanted to customize reading lists for each person?

I understand you could use a separate topic-based course for each individual, but then you'd lose the sense of a community of readers.

I realize the flip-side of this is that if nobody read anything the same or overlapping, they'd probably not have too much to talk about! smile But there still seems to be some sort of middle ground. Particularly among audo-didacts, you find people designing their own courses for self-study, but then they want a forum or community of like-minded folks to discuss with. Maybe moodle simply wouldn't be the appropriate way to go in that situation...

Tracy
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In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Customizing for individual students

by Tracy Gustilo -
Or... thinking about it a little differently, what if you simply wanted to customize readings for students to bring in different perspectives? Or because you have a mixed class with different competency levels? You'd like to coordinate their work to some degree (they're still in the same course), but you need the flexibility to work with individual students on more of a one-to-one basis. Seminars and research-type courses might be another example of needing to customize and work with students individually.

Just thoughts as I puzzle through. smile

Tracy
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In reply to Tracy Gustilo

Re: Customizing for individual students

by Ger Tielemans -

You bring in a good point: I was thinking of using the logbook for this purpose, but how to integrate the results there a little bit more automatatic...

 

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In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: Customizing for individual students

by Tranquil Earth -
Hi,

Just out of interest, I was wondering where the logbook is? Is it in a particular version of Moodle or is it something in the future?

I would like to find out how to manually insert grades for students coming from another system (other than moodle)?
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In reply to Tracy Gustilo

Re: Customizing for individual students

by Martin Dougiamas -
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I think you do need to have at least some content commonality to encourage interaction. If students are VERY different you might consider running different classes.

Something I've done in a course before is to have a core set of readings planned up front, but also to:

a) modify later topics acording to how things went with the group in the earlier topics.

b) have a set of optional readings stored in the last topic, and refer to these as needed to individual students from within the journal feedback.
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In reply to Tracy Gustilo

Re: Reading List Course Format

by Tom Murdock -
Can you create a forum called "READING LIST" where you add a long list of topics which are simply the designated book titles?

This way participants can respond (yes I read this, or a full-blown discussion) to the appropriate texts and you can do some easy analysis in the activity report as to whether individuals have been active in the reading list forum.

You could also create a "porfolio" forum for each student (designated by student name) where she creates discussions (blog-like) describing what she has been investigating. If you could teach the students how to imbed a web-link, the forum could also point over to the READING LIST forums.
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