ITEC Course Development Grant Application for 2012–20131
1) Name, departmental/program affiliation, and contact information:
Luis Figueroa, History Department [; cellphone: (860) 805-9485]
2) Course title and semester offered, type of students, and projected enrollment:
Hist. 283, The African Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, Fall 2012. This course is open to all students, including First-Year students. There are no pre-requisites. The projected enrollment for the Fall 2012 semester is about 12 to 15 students.
3) Course goals and how I plan plan to enhance student learning with technology:
In its first two iterations in the springs of 2011 and 2012, I approached teaching this course by relying on a fairly standard once-a-week seminar approach: students were responsible for studying a set of sources; posted weekly responses to these sources on Moodle forums; participated in class discussions; and produced a variety of papers. My goal now is to transform the course by incorporating "blended learning" and successful experiences I had in the late 1990s with class and student websites during the "web 1.0" era.
The center piece will be a course blog in which students will post their responses to sources, write papers, engage in online peer-review exercises,and will also post metacognition articles in ways that will foster a greater sense of a learning community and that, very importantly, will expose students to a far broader public that will very likely generate readers and participants in online discussions of the course's sources and both instructor- and student-generated work.
Space limitations, per ITEC guidelines, make it impossible to go in as much detail as I would like to in order to illustrate and justify with evidence from scholarship, assessments of similar experiences by other faculty at Trinity and elsewhere, and my personal experiences in the late 1990s. However, I hope that at least the following detailswill help ITEC to judge this proposal.
There are other aspects of this project that I will address in another proposal that I plan to submit to the Bryn Mawr grant competition before the end of June focusing on the more narrow definition of "blended learning" that Bryn Mawr has established.
First, the blog will be based on the WordPress blogging platform, which is a far more powerful content-management and social media-system than is generally acknowledged. I have developed extensive knowledge with WordPress since I designed, created and began to manage in early 2011 the website and blog for the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA), the scholarly organization in this field. This site is hosted by Trinity's Trinfo Cafe at I strongly encourage ITEC to explore PRSA's website and blog (the blog itself is a section called "Noticiero," accessible through the main menu) because it has several features, some unfortunately "behind the scenes," that I would include in the blog for Hist. 283.
In addition to course materials I will post, students will create blog articles that will include not only papers and their weekly responses to sources, but also short free-writing exercises we will do in the classroom and any other articles that they wish (and will be encouraged) to post, including audiovisual media and links to other online resources. My plan is to create the blog during the first weeks of the summer (late May to early June); create as site authors currently-enrolled students and encourage them to start using the blog during the summer; and to use a similar approach with FY students once they are enrolled.
Because the themes of this course have a very large audience, especially since the growth in interest in the African Diaspora in Latin America during the past two decades, I expect this blog to begin to appear in web searches done by a wide variety of people in the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean, and beyond. While creating PRSA's website, I learned powerful techniques that allow WordPress website developers to increase the likelihood that their websites are ranked higher in the results produced by web search engines.
Public readership and accountability is a core component of this project. As is documented in the research literature, and as I experienced first hand in the late 1990s, this is an essential mechanism that helps transform how students relate to their duties and the learning experience in a course. I will use and share with students, for example, Google Analytics real-time data during the semester that will show the profile of website visitors, which I expect will come not just from the U.S., based on my experience with the far more limited audience PRSA website.
Since another important goal of this course is to enhance critical reading, thinking, writing and presentation skills, centering the teaching and learning experience around the blog will be used also in the process of searching and evaluating online sources that students will use to write both formal and informal, required and not-required, blog articles. As research shows, writing online represents a different kind of writing, not only because of public readership, but also because it allows, indeed it is expected to include, the use of a multiplicity of modes of expression, both in rhetorical or discursive terms, and also because blogs allow readers to post comments on articles. In this sense, one of my strategies will be to alternatively require and encourage students to post comments on the blog articles posted by other students in the class, and to respond to the comments posted by visitors to the website. Students will also be instructed to include in their blog articles hyperlinks in which they establish connections between their own writing and that of other students in the course and also other articles found on the web.
To further increase the chances of a bigger readership, and also, very importantly, to help expand the social media aspects of the blog and the teaching\learning experience, I will create a Facebook page for the course where I and the students will post links to new blog articles. In addition, as I have done with PRSA's website, I will use a WordPress plugin that will appear on the blog's sidebar encouraging blog visitors to "Like" our Facebook page. The advantage of using this plugin for my pedagogical goals with this course is that students will begin to see how people start to interact with the site beyond what normally happens with virtually all the college-course blogs I have seen so far. Furthermore, students will be encouraged to promote both the blog and Facebook page among their Facebook "friends" and to post in their own Facebook status updates links to their own new blog articles or those created by other students. Again, please refer to PRSA's website to see how these inter-operation between a WordPress blog and a Facebook page works.
As I said earlier, space limitations prevent me from more fully demonstrating the extent to which I have thoroughly researched and developed the concept for how to implement a "blended learning" approach to this course that will extend it far beyond the confines of our two 75-minute class meetings each week. However, I hope that what I have described above is sufficient to consider this proposal as deserving one of the grants.
4) How will you determine if this technology innovation actually enhances student learning?
I will use a feature-rich WordPress plugin I use for PRSA's website to create on-going evaluation forms, accessible only by students enrolled in the course, to provide feedback on the course and the blog project over the course of the semester. I will collect their submissions and will address their questions, concerns and suggestions, in class, in person and online. I will also create a tailored final printed evaluation form that will be attached to the official History Department course evaluation form for students to fill out anonymously at the end of the semester.
5) How do you propose to spend up to $1,000 to support your plans?
I request the grant as a stipend to compensate for the time that will require setting up the blog with all the necessary functionalities, writing the new instructions for all the writing exercises, and producing the videos that will explain how to use the blog. I do not need to spend money on additional software, tools or materials, nor for training or student help.