English 3336 Restoration and Eighteenth Century Nonfiction Prose
Course Feedback form
April 2012

As you know, in this course I employ a number of learning strategies that are not conventional or common.  Now that you've experienced a full year's worth of them, I would very much appreciate comments on the way they work, especially dealing with whether they helped you learn, or made your learning more difficult, and why.  (I'm much less interested in whether they were enjoyable; of course, I hope they were, but my bottom line is about learning.) You don't need to respond to all -- or really, any -- of them, since your responses will be anonymous, but I am very interested in your perspective on how these strategies work (or don't) to foster deeper learning.
 
 
Your name (this will be deleted before the information is forwarded): 

 

Making the writing of students a central medium of communication in the course rather than primarily a means of evaluation:

 

Using written prompts to explain and structure what we'll be doing in and between classes:

 

Focusing classroom sessions on student input and discussion:

 

Using online (Moodle) forums, blogs and wikis as a way of sharing and discussing information and ideas:

 

Creating a course Web site to organize work and make information available:

 

Structuring the course around student decisions and choices, inviting students to take responsibility for the shape of the course:

 

Making frequent, short term assignments to support continuing engagement in the course:

 

Counting work as "done" rather than evaluating assignments and averaging them toward a grade:

 

Beginning explorations with generating and answering questions by research and reading:

 

Writing and research assignments whose audience is the other members of the class:

 

Tracking tasks completed to attain a minimum mark:

 

Assigning a weekly learning journal entry and counting it as a task completed:

 
 

Establishing grades via quantitative minima or learning reflection:

 

Strategies I haven't thought to ask about here that helped you to learn:

 

Strategies I haven't thought to ask about here that made learning more difficult:

 

Here are three slightly more general questions:
 

The focus of the course was on learning from independent reading, in scholarly as well as original texts. Would you say this was a valuable way to organize a course, or not? Why?

 

This is a course in literature, though its approach to texts is not conventional. To what extent do you think it helped you understand literature (especially, of course, nonfiction prose) better?

 

If you heard I were offering this course again, and you knew someone thinking about enrolling, what would you tell her?