Avoiding Pitfall #5: Ignore the ways students learn from each other.

I think this is always a challenge when designing a blended course that has a substantial online portion.  In particular, my contents focus on how to code in statistical software R, and sometimes I find it difficult to promote student-student interactions.  It is also true that I tend to think back when I learned R–it was much of a struggle self-learning without any help or learning from others.

There are two ways that I would like to implement to avoid this pitfall of ignoring the ways students learn from each other.  First, I would like to have a very active discussion posts in Canvas, so that students can post any questions about coding or class contents in general.  I am hoping that others who know the “answer(s)” will provide their insight on these questions.  At the end, everyone speaks differently and codes differently. Therefore, it would be a good way to learn from others and see how others code.  Second, I want to emphasize learning within the student learning community that we have in
H513.  With these small groups of 4 or 5, I hope that students can learn from each other in a more intimate manner.  Reflecting back on the first time I taught H513, I am not sure if I emphasized this enough.  My goal for next fall would be to really emphasize this type of group learning.