I wish I could reflect on these best practices, because it sounds like a great opportunity. Unfortunately, I'm overcommitted right now. Maybe next year!
(Loved the advice about building a network, here, though. It takes a village, and another village to help you find the village. I'm even grateful to the people who just stare blankly at me when I ask them questions, because it's like there's subtitles under them that say "You're in the wrong village."
This issue of students not knowing why they're going is what informed my artificial perspective in Debate 4 -- there's this lingering question of "why are we all here?" which I found in trade school and traditional universities. Talking about boot camps as employer-provided boot camps was refreshing, as it talked about the realism behind it all... how could a small business afford to offer things like that?
Overall, the podcast made me excited to get back to teaching, and wishing I could start the semester over knowing what I know after taking this class... and also, just being a little bit braver about the more exciting of the two classes I'm teaching this term.
Talking with someone from Activision earlier this week, it was suggested to me that the best thing I could make students do would be a game jam. I'd kind of rather do that than a final, but the expectation of a final exam is that it's only a couple hours at some point during the final exam week. But the last week can harness some of the concepts these influencers were talking about, and we can just do a game jam "whether we want to or not"
"An even better use of concept maps, though, is to provide students with a focus question to which the concept map comes as a response." -- Interesting, I'll try that and post here about how it goes. One thing that inspires me to make concept maps (or whatever near-miss of a concept map I end up making) is falling into a Cava-hole, where I just clip and save things that I find graphically interesting so I have something to make a lesson from.
The 1 Minute Thesis -- this seems simple enough, I'm totally stealing it. I have to be honest, I'm not sure I know how to use it in an online asynchronous class, but I'll find a way.
Actually, I probably won't be able to think of one... Emily, how do I do a 1-minute thesis in an online asynchronous class? Assuming they detest me? Not all of them do. But some of them do. Oh god it's hopeless... I'll never reach anybody. My days of teaching are over, I thought they were just starting, but that fulfilling experience I had? That wasn't the start, it was the end, it's already over, isn't it? You can be honest, I can handle it.
My life in academia is a Bergman film. I'm playing Candyland with the grim reaper, oh no he got bored and left, I'm playing Candyland by myself. When does it get better?
UPDATE: I did use a 3-minute quiz (after Dr. Johnson helped me think of a practical way to implement the 1-minute thesis in my online asynchroous class of too many students) and it worked really well, maybe because I kept the question low-stakes and creative. For more detailed notes, see entry on \"Game Jam Assignment\", forthcoming after this semester's dust settles.) FIN.