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Introducing Religion to Cyberstudents - Adapting, Condensing, and Reconfiguring the Course PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

I made a decision early on not to try to “lecture” to my students. I began to examine what exactly I wanted the students to do, to learn, and to write. I believe that it is reading, not lecturing, that holds the highest value for learning in my courses, so my job becomes that of a guide — asking questions and pointing the students’ attention toward the central concepts and arguments being made by the authors of the texts I have assigned. With that in mind, I was able to condense my usual classroom lectures into short, written “mini-lectures” that I posted at the top of the folder for each week’s units. This meant I did not have to struggle with new technology of podcasts or vlogs (video logs). The students seemed to be content not to hear my voice or see my face, just as I did not see or hear them.

When I adapted the course, I discovered that there were a few things I did in my face-to-face class that I could not do online. I had to give up one of my favorite classroom exercises because I could not figure out how to translate it into a project that could be completed by different students at different times instead of all at once as a brainstorming session. The assignment is simply to come up with the largest possible list of “religions” and then organize it, entailing lots of discussion about what we mean by “religion,” what counts and what doesn’t, and how we group various religions together to make sense of a list of undifferentiated data. Without the vocal, immediate back-and-forth discussion, this list just never got very long, and the students were reluctant to reorder them, even though the wiki tool seemed like the perfect forum for encouraging the students to rearrange the religions into new groupings.

Meanwhile, because I was not only adapting the course to the online format but also condensing a fourteen-week semester-long class into a six-week intensive summer one, I was forced to evaluate very carefully the organization of the course. I found that doing so improved my face-to-face version of the course as well, making it more coherent and focusing my attention on the most important facets of each unit. For example, in the six-week course, I needed to have the students cover more than one “dimension” in a week if I was going to have time to also cover the basic facts of the three religious traditions and have students complete projects and write papers. So, I paired Myth with Doctrine, deciding that beginning with these two dimensions would mimic the way that children grow up in a religion and the way that a convert to a religion would be presented with the creeds and basic worldview. I paired the Experiential with the Ritual, as inward and outward expressions or interpretations of the same event. Finally, I introduced the Social and Legal dimensions as building upon and reinforcing elements of the previous four dimensions. Using the dimensions in this way allowed me to create a series of prompts on the discussion board that the students could use to demonstrate their mastery of the concepts after reading some primary text readings and the textbook — usually Gary Kessler’s Studying Religion: An Introduction through Cases, third ed., McGraw-Hill, 2007 —and often a video or Website for more first-person or primary text examples.



 

This website contains archived issues of Religious Studies News published online from March 2010 to May 2013, and PDF versions of print editions published from Winter 2001 to October 2009.

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