Integrating technology into an assignment – for example, a digital story, Web-based or digital essay, or GIS project – can present challenges, but it can also be highly rewarding for students. Such assignments can inspire students to express their ideas in a creative, personal way, can engage the students fully in producing high-quality work for a truly public audience, and can teach students valuable technology skills that may be useful in other courses and in the students’ careers after Bucknell. Based on our experience with past technology integrations, we in ITEC offer the following advice about how to design a successful technology-based assignment in your course(s):
- Advanced planning is crucial to the success of such assignments. A technology-based assignment requires students to learn multiple skills that they may not currently possess. The work involved in completing the project successfully can be highly time-consuming. It is essential that a faculty member considering such an assignment meet with an ITEC staff member well in advance of the semester in order to discuss the scope of the assignment and to map out how you will incorporate the training sessions for students and the work required to complete the project into your syllabus. A well-designed, well-planned assignment has a high likelihood of success, although there will always be challenges when students grapple with a multifaceted, complex task. A poorly designed assignment or one adopted in a hurry has a much greater likelihood of failing, causing students to resent the extra work they did for a project whose significance they may not understand. If your assignment will have a significant research component, we strongly recommend that you collaborate with one of Library and IT’s reference librarians in Research Services, meeting with him/her in advance of the semester to help you choose appropriate topics and perhaps to create a subject guide to help your students find appropriate sources and use those sources effectively.
- As part of the advanced planning we recommended just above, you will need to map out the work the students will ultimately perform, and that work is best envisioned in stages. In other words, an assignment with clear, incremental due dates will most often lead to a successful final project. To help students complete a complex assignment, the structure of the assignment needs to be incorporated into your syllabus. For example, if you are asking your students to create a five-minute documentary about a subject relevant to your course, you might schedule incremental due dates for the student work as follows:
- Week 3: Submit a topic of interest for your documentary
- Week 4: Submit the treatment for the documentary.
- Week 5: Provide an annotated bibliography of sources relevant to the documentary. Conduct a site visit, submit your production schedule, provide a list of possible interview subjects and interview questions.
- Week 7: Attend in-class equipment training, including advice on conducting interviews. (No deliverable this week.)
- Week 8: Attend in-class editing training session(s). Production should be in progress. (No deliverable this week, either.)
- Week 11: Preview your documentary draft with Library and IT’s video production specialist. Production should be wrapping up.
- Week 12: Present your documentary to your classmates.
- Week 13: Showcase your documentary publicly to a wider university audience.
By providing due dates for each step in the production process, you are helping students manage the work involved, and you are thereby making it more likely that students won’t leave too much of that work to the last minute.
- As the hypothetical schedule just above suggests, it is a good idea to have some kind of public showcase for the student projects. The showcase could involve only members of the course, but if the audience extends beyond fellow classmates, then students often work diligently to make sure that their final product represents the highest quality work that they can do. Having two public showcases – one for class members and one for a public audience – gives the students a kind of initial “dress rehearsal” (the first presentation of their work), forcing students to have a good “complete draft” by that time. The second (more public) display allows the students to make minor changes before submitting/presenting their project in its “final”, most polished form.
- It is important for students to have some autonomy and flexibility in choosing their project, since it gives the students a feeling of ownership of the work that they will produce. However, in our experience, too much flexibility is a bad idea. Usually, it is better to focus on one particular technology for the project. It is also better to provide students with some suggested topics for projects. Research topics that students might choose on their own could be too broad or too vague for the suggested scope of the assignment, and some research questions require data that may be very hard to obtain within the time frame of the project. We strongly encourage faculty members to work with your ITEC parnter to provide guidance for students about good, manageable research topics that are appropriate to the length and time frame of the work being produced. Since ITEC staff members have collaborated with multiple faculty members on course-related projects, we have developed significant experience (also known as ” battle scars”) concerning project ideas that are likely to be successful. We encourage faculty members to begin with a small, highly focused project idea. We chose a five-minute documentary in our example above (rather than, say, a 10-minute or 15-minute documentary) because a short, focused project is much more likely to be completed successfully while still fulfilling your learning goals, as compared to a larger project that could turn out to be a “loose, baggy monster” that students won’t be able to finish in time.
- It’s very important that the assignment be relevant to the course content, so that students understand why you are asking them to produce a certain kind of technology-based product. The assignment needs to make sense within the larger structure of the course, and the mode of the assignment (the specific technology being used) needs to make sense as well. We strongly recommend that faculty members explain to the students very explicitly why they are including this kind of assignment in the course, articulate very clearly how much work the assignment will involve, and explain why that work is relevant to the way knowledge is produced in your particular field.
In general, a well-designed, structured assignment can be highly successful and rewarding for the students. An assignment first envisioned in the middle of a semester with a tight deadline can often lead to student frustration and dissatisfaction. We strongly encourage faculty members interested in incorporating technology-based assignments into their courses to contact ITEC before the start of a semester, allowing ITEC staff to work with you to ensure that the assignment truly is a rewarding, enlightening experience for you and for your students.