Rethinking the classroom

Online classes are the future. Right?

At 9:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, I sat in a traditional classroom and dreamed up ways to make that room a little less necessary. Over breakfast tacos from Austin food trailer favorite Torchy’s, I explained to my partners in this crime, Mary Crawford and Katey Psencik, that I want to dump a vital lecture module in my reporting class.

Instead of standing in front of 120 students and showing slide after slide full of text, I wondered aloud whether the students can do something fun while learning.

“We could have them play the game,” said Psencik, one of my star undergrads who is helping me rebuild a basic reporting class and turn it into a hybrid - part online, part in person. The game she was referring to is the Watergate game that made the rounds a few weeks ago. We giggled a bit (the tongue-in-cheek game is far from accurate), and then we seriously considered the idea.

We have until the spring 2014 semester to rebuild this core class. Crawford is the resident expert - she was hired by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communication to foster this type of experimentation. She also took the suggestion seriously.

I don’t know whether we’ll have journalism students playing the silly Watergate game as part of a college credit, though the brainstorming we’re doing will result in creativity and innovation that is sorely needed in academia. Although I only just finished my second year as an academic, I’m not new to this game; I’ve taught a social media journalism course online for two semesters, and I’m teaching it again starting July 15.

I have made it clear in our brainstorming sessions: I think online courses generally suck, and this hybrid course has to be good. It has to be fun. It has to be innovative. It has to catch the students’ attention. It has to be interactive to hold their attention. It has to be more than just material they can Google.

I’m glad we have seven months to work on it. We’re going to need it.