HST107: Remote learning revised schedule and information

Revised schedule

  • Week 10: foxes, and the story of “Miss Ren”
  • Week 11: editorial meeting on Tue + Searching for demons in the mountains
  • Week 12: Dragons, Chinese medicine
  • Week 13: Monkey (optional extras: connects with stories of Taizong in Hell and Nezha)
  • Week 14: Story of the Stone (optional extra: connects with Tang period short stories)
  • Week 15: final classes: conclusions, evals, considerations for a re-run (preferably in a non-pandemic time)

Flow of the week, starting next week:

  • Materials are made available during the weekend (or Friday) for the following week
  • first post in response to materials by Tuesday
  • Tuesday zoom meeting: if you have course-contents or project questions, all are invited
    • NOTE: two Tuesday meetings as editorial meetings: Tue March 31 and Tue April 14 to talk about the textbook project, all need to participate [barring tech issues, illness etc.]
  • Wednesday: responses to others’ posts
  • Thursday: zoom meeting as a class, to go through main contents issues
  • by Monday: write a reflection on course materials from the previous week

Assignments:

Discussions on Canvas:

  • first post due by Tuesday
  • replies to first posts due by Wednesday
  • This mimics small group discussions, but with a slightly different perspective.
  • Counts towards “Thoughtful participation”

Zoom sessions

  • Tuesday meeting: available to talk about projects, readings, course contents, but as a student-guided discussion.
    • You can create an agenda in the groupme for things you want to discuss
  • Thursday meeting: class time to talk about course contents
  • These Zoom meetings will be recorded and posted on Canvas (=privately), with links provided on the course website, like slides are already.

Pre-recorded videos:

  • Lecture fragments:
    • to help put texts for discussion into context
    • to model interpretation of sources
    • available with all other course materials at the start of the week
    • will try to embed them on website, but also posted on Canvas
  • Responses to whole class
    • responding to major trends in questions or problems I detect in discussion board, and want to eliminate before we get to the heart of the topic on hand
    • will be available before Friday’s class
    • will be pointed out in the daily briefing
    • will be posted on Canvas (for increased privacy)

Reading materials

  • depends on what I can find without access to the library
    • Good news: lots and lots of ebooks, and I have a ton of PDFs
  • more options, less collectively reading same text
  • use the discussions to respond to texts, and educate your classmates on elements they may not have caught, and to learn from them as well. You already did this in class, but it now is made more visible.

Consequences:

  • your learning path will be more individualized
  • This means that reading and responding to each other’s work becomes more important.
    • The weekly reflection will be updated to include the question: what new insights did you learn from interacting with your classmates?
    • peer learning is an excellent way to learn: this does not mean the quality of your education decreases, just that it looks and feels differently.