My Next Big Crazy Idea - Ditching the Textbook

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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Where do I go from here?  How do I use my experience in the rabbit hole to provide better learning experiences for my students?

Realizing how much I learned from non-print resources, I decided to redesign my online Descriptive Astronomy course to ditch the textbook.  I'm not talking about going from a traditional print book to an ebook or freebook. I'm talking about ditching any sort of linear reading material at all.

Instead, I plan to adopt a more inquiry based approach to the course, giving my students specific problems to solve and curating a set of resources for them to use as a jumping off point into their own searches.  Ideally, as they find their own resources, we as a class can collate those in a class wiki.  I might divide students into groups on different projects and have them report back to the class on their findings or I might have them pick what they want to investigate next.  Don't know yet.  Lots of possibilities floating around in my head.

My first step is to rewrite the syllabus from a knowledge-based to an inquiry-based format.  For example, instead an objective like:

Provide a capsule summary of our solar system

A more inquiry-based approach would be more like this:

• Investigate the physical and orbital properties of objects in the solar system
• Categorize objects in the solar system based on various properties
• Develop a classification scheme for objects in the solar system based on trends across various categories of properties.

Instead of spending a week reading about terrestrial planets, a week about gas and ice giants, and a week about the small bodies, they could spend three weeks actually doing science and thinking critically. Instead of memorizing and spitting back nice little charts in the textbook that summarize the similarities and differences between objects in the solar system, they can make those charts themselves.

Heck, if I play my cards right, I might even get them to write their own final exam questions...

Blackboard has started a #100DaysOfLearning campaign across social media.  They kicked it off on July 21, so counting today (July 26), I have 95 more days of learning.  I'm committed to spending at least part of each of those days remaining in the original 100 working on learning how to redesign my online course to encourage my students to be more active learners.