I CALLed it!

 Alright...alright... bad pun 😅

But to be fair, CALL (computer-assisted language learning) does lend itself to some bad puns... And that's before I even get into other acronyms like TELL and MALL😹. I promise to spare students the dad jokes in the fall😅

Anyway, last week I decided to answer my pondering as to what my course redesign should cover, and I settled on designing an Introduction to CALL course. I decided that the course number (685) doesn't matter all that much considering that our course numbers over the past 30 years have drifted to an extent that they make some sense, but they aren't (as a whole) totally coherent, and that's not my problem to solve. The next part of my mission is to determine learning objectives (which I more or less have) and determine what kinds of assessments and activities I want to include. The universe of possibilities feels rather endless, so I need to find the right size for semester activities and assessments.

One of the things that I've been pondering lately has been the right amount of work for a graduate class. Over the past few years, I've taken or audited a few graduate (MA) classes, and I've noticed that for most classes the "standard" still appears to be some sort of summative paper at the end of the term that's around 3000 words plus a project (or a few smaller mini activities), or around 5000-6000 words as a single assessment. I'd like to keep the single paper as an option if students really want to do that, but I was thinking of other more creative outlets for activities and projects. I am thinking of incorporating technology showcases and critical analyses of edtech in the language classroom as part of this, but I wonder what the right cadence is to do some in-depth work. Once new tech per week?  One new tech every couple of weeks? individual work?  Group project? Do weekly discussions still have a spot in classes or are we just continuing down this path because we've been doing it for 20+ years? 🤔.

One of the things that I used to do when I taught the Design of Online Instruction course for the instructional design program was to have student groups design and facilitate one weekly module. This basically meant that the last 5 weeks of the term (so 1/3 of the term) were student-run. The topics came from a pool of topics, so it became a jigsaw with a mix of research, evaluation, design, and facilitation elements.  I think this could be fun.  If you were running this, what topics would make it to your pool of topics for students to pick from?

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