My project "Hot Topics" is short research project for the
intro Discovery Class in College of ACES. This is a LARGE
class with over 550 students. As this is the first class
that students have as they start their undergraduate career
in ACES many are "lost" according to the ACES Dean of
Student Affairs and former ACES 100 class leader, Wayne
Banwart. Part of what I was trying to create in this
project was a sense community to connect new freshmen with
others within their area of interest. ACES is very broad
with majors ranging from Animal Sciences to Child
Development which led me to one of the project goals which
was to connect like-minded students through online
discussion tools. I always like to quote my English
professor wife who says, "a class of over 400 students IS
distance education," and discussion tools often used for
students at a distance were chosen for this project despite
all of the students are campus based.
This course is interesting in that the large group lectures
have be replaced by online lectures with synchronized
visuals (usually Powerpoint) recorded in my studio. This
demonstrates the openness of the course leaders to try
online activities, but still they are very careful with how
online material is used. The comments later on by the
former Dean in charge bears this out.
The small group research project with these new communities
is a student-centered activity where the groups develop a
topic within their interest areas. This research project is
of a "current event" nature so the needed information would
need to be gathered mostly from primary sources via the
internet and other communication/research tools. Fittingly,
one of the major objectives of the ACES 100 Discovery
course is to become comfortable with electronic resource
usage. In this way my project is breaking some new ground
with the community building but also extending and
contributing to existing objectives.