Learned in the first few weeks

This has been a semester for learning already, after only two weeks!

First, I tried Prezi for supplementing my lecture on the second day of class at San Elijo campus. It worked really well, even though I had to run around and beg a mouse with a scrollwheel from the tech folks before class. Prezi’s zoom feature is just impossible without one, and with Prezi zooming is the whole point.

The students enjoyed the presentation mode so much they asked to be able to access the Prezi after class, so I made it public (Prezi calls this “published”), but with some trepidation. I cite all my sources, but still…. and the new UCLA case has me kind freaked. I went aherad and made it public. Then I sat down to work on the next lecture.

History, of course, is a flow, and I realized it would be much better conceptually to add to the first Prezi presentation instead of making a second one. I did that, and went to class this week. But when I tried to use the Prezi, the browser kept crashing. I had to improvise quickly, creating a visual assignment out of the textbook because the technology wasn’t working (I tell all faculty “have a backup plan!”, but do I do that? NO). They did good work, but it wasn’t what I’d wanted to do, especially having spent 2.5 hours adding to the Prezi and figuring out how to get audio into it. Pieces of music by Handel, Bach and Mozart came to nothing! I posted my agony in Twitter, and Jim Julius at SDSU came to my rescue, telling me to download the Prezi and use the downloaded version as the primary presentation. Turns out Prezi downloads little players when you do that, so now I can link it for students without making it public too. Don’t you love social networking????

Another interesting thing that happened relates to enrollment.  Well before the semester started, I had students begging to get into classes, as we all did since so many colleges have had to cut back their offerings. MiraCosta has not, both because we’re on a different funding structure than other colleges in California, and because our Board has wisely been willing to tap into the college’s reserves (stashed for years with great wisdom and foresight, to my way of thinking, given the spendthrift habits of this state during times of surplus) to keep classes open.

But I noticed that few students were dropping my classes, so students from my wait list couldn’t get in. At the same time, when I exchanged emails with those wait list students, a few would write back with, “that’s OK, I was able to get into another instructor’s class”. I wrote to this instructor and asked how was he doing it, getting students to drop? scaring them to death? and if so, how could I do it too? I just knew that many of the enrolled students wouldn’t be able to handle the load, but didn’t have the sense to drop early.

Finally, I asked one of the students who’d gotten into the other instructor’s section, just sort of musing by email, “I wonder why my students are being so ‘sticky’, why they aren’t dropping?” and she wrote back, “I know why, for the same reason I was interested in your class, Ratemyprofessfor.com :)”.  Oooohhh. A few years ago I began inviting students at the end of the semester to put a critique at that site as well as in my evaluation forms. Apparently it’s bringing me some business!