Course Redesign ePortfolio Showcase

I am taking a course in which I usually teach 35 students and converting it to all online, and I am expanding it to up to 200 students. My goals are to retain or improve pedagogical success rates, reduce the DWF rates in my course, sustain a high level of philosophical rigor, liberate the course from a fixed meeting time and space, and allow somewhat asynchronous and independent work by students through the online format.

This project begins with a standard philosophy course in biomedical ethics, which serves a large number of philosophy majors/minors as well as students in science- and health-related disciplines. It converts the course into an entirely online mode while still preserving as much of the rigor and engaging discussion as possible, both between professors and students and among students themselves.

Redesign PHIL 101 Ethics and Social Issues for sections to be delivered fully online. The course will meet or exceed a recently adopted eLearning policy which puts Quality Matters quality assurance at the fore. The attempt is to retain or improve pedagogical success rates in the online environment as compared with traditional sections of the course and confront the special challenges presented an online course where assessment is writing intensive.

My goal is to design, implement, deliver an online version of Phil 131 complete with content, assignments and assessments.

The goal of this project is to provide an interactive platform for learning about scientific worldviews by: 1) Understanding and applying concepts in the philosophy of science; 2)Evaluating empirical support for scientific case studies by analyzing the scientific methodology behind those studies; 3) Understanding and evaluating the historical progression and difference between distinct scientific worldviews, including the Newtonian and contemporary worldviews associated with quantum and relativistic physics and evolutionary and neurobiology; 4) Extrapolating some of the implications of science and changing worldviews for Moral Theory and Moral Psychology. The interactive platform will address 2 components: lecture module and interactive animation/experiment. The former is a structured, edited Camtasia or video presentation of lecture material. The latter is an experimental method to engage students by working together with the instructor in order to generate ideas for animated lectures. The students will suggest concepts, themes, and empirical examples as well as the organization style for the animated lecture.

I am developing hybrid and online versions of PHIL 102, Logic and Critical Thinking, that will be available to all Chico State students and successful in improving students' critical thinking skills. This course was developed to meet the A3 critical thinking requirement in EO 1033: "In critical thinking (subarea A3) courses, students will understand logic and its relation to language; elementary inductive and deductive processes, including an understanding of the formal and informal fallacies of language and thought; and the ability to distinguish matters of fact from issues of judgment or opinion. In A3 courses, students will develop the abilities to analyze, criticize, and advocate ideas; to reason inductively and deductively; and to reach well-supported factual or judgmental conclusions." Success will be measured by comparing the results of pre-and post-tests designed to measure the critical thinking skills detailed above.

This is a flipped, self-paced, peer-tutoring approach to an introductory course in symbolic logic. All lecture material is delivered online. Class meetings occur on a traditional schedule, with the entire meeting devoted to tutoring and testing. The course is divided into 12 learning modules and students must achieve mastery of a module before proceeding to the next one. Evidence of mastery is a B or better on a module test. To receive a B or higher in the class students must spend a specified number of hours tutoring other students. The course grade is a strict function of the last module test passed.

The aim is to develop a fully online course capable of serving over 200 students.The instructional spine of this course is a series of instructor created screencasts on every chapter of the text. The course is organized into 10 learning modules, each of which covers 2-4 chapters. Using Blackboard, an online quiz is given after each chapter which covers the text, the lecture and online supplemental material. Quizzes are set to adaptive release, so that students must pass one assessment before moving on to the next. A test is administered at the end of each module. Each module also comes with a writing assignment which students complete in an online journal using Google Docs

Redesign PHIL 103 Business and Computer Ethics to offer as a fully online megasection. The course will meet or exceed a recently adopted eLearning policy which puts Quality Matters quality assurance at the fore. The attempt is to retain or improve pedagogical success rates in the online environment as compared with traditional sections of the course and confront the special challenges presented an online course where assessment is writing intensive.

I already use Active Learning Strategies and Collaborative Learning in the class. With this redesign, I will flip the classroom as well, leaving more time for Active Learning Strategies. Incentives for students to complete assignments ahead of class will include formative and summative assessments using iClickers that will allow both instant feedback and increased time for discussion and learning activities. I plan to experiment with the hybrid delivery format.

A barrier to success for struggling students is a lack of confidence that they are completing the exercises correctly which are similar in character to exercises in mathematics. We propose to create a generally applicable web-based application that will guide students through homework assignments for the course and a complete set of applicable exercises and assessments that can be solved on this platform.

The goal of the course redesign is to better utilize technology to (1) increase retention and decrease attrition in the context of a fully online PHIL 110 course; (2) make PHIL 110 scalable so that more fully online sections can be offered each semester; and (3) address challenges faced by first-time college students taking a fully online PHIL 110 course.