Description of Assignment
Textbooks suck, right? They’re expensive, overwritten, clucky, written by people who haven’t been outside of academia in decades, and painfully expensive (yes…I’m counting that one twice). I’m working on creating a collection of materials so future students in this class won’t need to buy them anymore and I’m having you help me create them.
My goal is to create a collection of free materials which will eventually cover all the material in our textbook for free. I am personally working on finding readings which cover the material we use in this course for free. Between open-source textbooks, journal articles, and wiki entries I hoping to cobble together a collection of materials to replace our book, however, these will all still be written by academics with varying degrees of quality and accessibility. This is where you come in: for your final assignment this semester I am having each group create a video covering an aspect of the course to explain it in layman’s terms.
My plan is to assign each group an idea which is especially important or confusing and have the group explain it using examples from daily life. I encourage groups to be as creative as they wish and to use whatever tools, skills, and languages they natural have pre-existing to them to create the videos. The goal in the short-medium term is to create axillary videos to explain important concepts but in the long term to have multiple videos for each concept explaining things in different ways, languages, and lengths so feel free to make it yours!
The important thing to focus on in these videos is that the information is both accurate and cited (meaning that the explanation of the concepts is cited from wherever it is being paraphrased from). A good way to think about this is that I would like you to offer an explanation of the concept using terminology of the course and then follow that up with some type of example such as a skit, story, or something else to that affect which demonstrates the concept. I would then hope to see the example explained in terms of how it relates to the concepts.
Credit for this assignment will be awarded in full based upon it’s meeting these requirements. All videos will be given full credit once the information is deemed to be accurate and cited appropriately, the example deemed to accurately reflect the concepts, and the explanation deemed to accurately compare the two. Once these goals are met full credit will be awarded regardless of time or the number of revisions required to get there.
To assure everyone is able to get to that point, the following schedule will be used for work to be completed. I will check in with everyone during these times to offer assistance and answer any questions.
Insert dates & times here:
This should be a helpful assignment both for us to create and for future students to have available to them. I’m looking forward to getting to work on this. Here goes nothing!
