E-mailBiology 163 - Organic Gardening
Jim Sweeton teaches Biology 163 at Mesa Community College. He has decided to try adapting the course to an online environment so that students can sign up to take it in the school's new distance education program offered in Sakai.
Organic gardening provides an in-depth study of the principles and practices of modern home gardening through a basic understanding of biological science. Plants, soils and climates are studied in relation to the production of vegetables, herbs, flowers, and perennial food plants. Biological and chemical approaches to gardening are discussed, with the goal of helping students to formulate their own approach to growing things organically.
Pedagogical challenges to address in the online environment:
- This course requires students to work with a partner to evaluate different approaches to organic gardening and come up with a plan for their garden.
- This course requires students to build their own garden and have it peer reviewed virtually on an ongoing basis.
- This course requires students to formulate and share their philosophy of gardening throughout the class.
- This course requires students to conduct experiments upon soil used in their gardens, compare soil types with their classmates, write a final capstone paper linking soil discrepancies with agricultural outcomes produced in their own gardens.
Course Design and Learning Activities:
- Assignment #! - Students would review provided resources using Resources.
- Assignment #2 - Each partner group would have a Wiki page on which they record their discussion related to the different approaches to organic gardening as a Peer Learning Activity. The end result of this assignment would be a report synthesizing the team's analysis and your chosen gardening method.
- Assignment #3 - Build a garden. Each team will have a Blog to record the progress of the actual garden. The blog would include pictures, and daily reports. Other teams would use the comments capability to evaluate the garden. The students will be expected to record their philosophy of gardening in the blog entries.
- Assignment #4 -outside tool like Google Docs would be used to record the soil sample analysis for all of the teams. The access to Google Apps would be inserted as a web content link in Sakai.
- Assignment #5 - The students would submit their final capstone paper using the results of their garden and the synthesized data contained in the shared spreadsheet.
- Instructor will use Announcements to communicate to students throughout the course.
- The Grade Book will use dto assign track grades for each of these activities.
Identified Gaps: Shared editable documents (Google Docs), need for sequencing or mapping tool to bring all of the tools used into a shared cohesive course map or plan. (Digital Lesson Planning such as Lams)