The design and development of my course:

Hello all. I am currently working on a French 101 course for Spring 2014, so I will use this course as an example to talk about my pedagogical goals and objectives.

In French 101, students have a set SLO objective, which is to read, write, speak, and understand the French language at the basic level. Students will learn to conjugate the essential French verbs in the present tense, they will learn to write and talk about themselves, their education, their family, their leisure, and the places they go to in town.

I will follow a text, Espaces, and students will be doing homework on the Espaces website. We will be covering the first 5 chapters of Espaces.

I will refer to the Weekly Column Design to organize my class. Each week will have a title as well, so that students know what will be covered.

I am very big on checking students’ progress on a permanent basis and immediately after we cover a topic or grammar point. This will be the challenge for me online, but I think that with the help of Wimba Voice board, I will feel more comfortable about this. I am going to get constant feedback from students through quizzes and voice recordings, and this might put my mind more at ease in terms of their progress. I have learned that it is never a good idea to put off checking in with students to see where they are, as it will be too late by mid-semester to have to go back to the beginning and get tutoring help to catch up.

I have two big questions that I still need to resolve and will probably do so by the end of this course:

1)      How do we test students? I am used to writing my own tests and I am not sure how to implement them online.

2)      How many synchronous sessions should I include in my class?

Since we are asked to share a link, I would like to share the University of Texas interactive French website, which is made to be used by all educators. It is also another example of a course that is organized online.

I enjoyed reading Ko and Rosen’s Chapter 3, and plan on checking out the websites they have suggested for getting help when creating an online course.

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