This is the third and final installment in our summer pedagogy series. We invite you to join the discussion in our comments section at the bottom of the post.
This past summer, I taught an upper-division/graduate readings course on North American Borderlands History online for Western New Mexico University. Teaching history online presents unique opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, digital tools as simple as LMS assignment submission systems and email provide direct lines of communication with students that don’t always exist as readily in face-to-face settings where assignment feedback can often be somewhat one sided. The challenge is that although I have more direct and interactive means of discussing assignments and course concepts with students in the online classroom, they often fail to engage those opportunities.
In order to make online teaching feel less like a correspondence course, I assign Twitter, blogging, and an online timeline platform at tiki-toki.com to engage students in unique assignments that require them to use their skills of critically analyzing and discussing the monographs, articles, and primary sources that we are working on as a class. Continue reading
Borderlands History 