| Students
worked very hard to produce good papers in this class, and their fear of
having poor work on the world wide web seemed to provide good incentive.
After I graded assignments, most of students went on line and corrected
the mistakes they had made. Others did not. I was not entirely
satisfied with papers produced on the web because formatting is difficult
and primitive. This is not a word processor, and good formatting
is very important for upper level history papers. Students did, however,
format their final papers as Microsoft Word documents, and John Blackburn
put them on the web with the Acrobat software.
The discussion forum simply did not work. I had hoped that students would use it as they read, and engage others in discussions about points in the assigned reading. The class was a discussion based seminar, and students did not see any point in using yet another medium for discussion. Student
evaluation on line was not what I would have liked. I prefer a method
where students can anonymously evaluate me, and those evaluations would
appear on line for everyone to see. Students also found the
evaluation unwieldy and would have preferred one with fewer questions that
permitted more comments.
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