What advantages should you expect from hybrid course redesign? Winterim Hybrid Course Redesign Workshop

1. What advantages should you expect from hybrid course redesign? Winterim Hybrid Course Redesign Workshop Alan Aycock, Ph.D. Learning Technology Center University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee

2. Buy Me! Ads and Shopping in American Culture • Initially taught at graduate level in 2002 • Redesigned for Freshman Seminar program • FS program focuses on retention • Provides introduction to university-level work • Not an honors course • 19 first-year students, 70% women, 25% minority students

3. What do I know about my students? • Traditional first-year students have rarely ventured outside of immediate Midwest region • Mostly first-generation college students from working class background • Not critical readers nor inclined to read extensively • Nevertheless, experienced audience for advertising, consumer goods, and mass media • Most have worked in retail sector • Most are interested in and knowledgeable about fashion • Need to develop academic computer skills, though most know basics

4. What advantages does the hybrid mode offer? • Frequent low-stakes assignments • Rapid turn-around and feedback • Gradual increase in rigor • Seek to “break up” class by mixture of voices, e.g., lecture, class discussion, videos, small group work, individual projects • Emphasis on examination of own experience as American consumer

5. Choosing a model for hybrid course redesign • Classic works on “backwards design” • Understanding by Design, Wiggins & McTighe 2005 • Effective Grading, Walvoordt & Anderson 1998 • Advantages of backwards design • Practice-oriented instead of abstract theory • Intuitive for most faculty • Learning objectives linked to empirically verifiable outcomes

6. Backwards design process • What do I want my students to be able to do(i.e., not just “know”) at the end of the course? • What evidence or documentation do I require to demonstrate my students’ learning? • What learning activities will produce this evidence or documentation?

7. So what do I want my students to be able to do? • I want my students to apply standard forms of textual analysis to “decode” advertising, both print and audiovisual • I want my students to produce their own “thick” ethnographic data and analyze the data using a standard theoretical model of shopping • I want my students to extend the notion of “marketing” to areas that are not strictly commercial, e.g., science, religion, education

8. What evidence will I accept? • Use of standard textual-critical techniques such as asymmetry and substitution to identify “preferred” and “resistant” readings of ads • Use of “thick description” to delineate ethnographically relevant cognitive rules of shopping • Use of PowerPoint to use a multidimensional model to develop a shopping “mini-ethnography” • Use of the “marketing” metaphor to interpret students’ experience of religion, science, or education

9. Sample learning activities • Studying up exercise (asymmetry and substitution) • Shopping knowledge (“thick description”) • Shop until you drop (“mini-ethnography”) • Everything is a brand (extending the marketing idea)