As you know, I had some reservations about the liquid syllabus, in part, because I do like the Google Doc interactive syllabus that students can communicate with me about as they read it.  It's just been a meaningful and inspiring way to start digging in and really talking to one another before the course gets rolling, and students make tons of comments and have whole conversations on there, so it's been great.  That said, I've come around on the liquid syllabus, and I think it will be quite useful.  It also forced me to pare down a lot of my wordy descriptions and imbed more images and video, which I think is a huge improvement, and it also allowed me to remove more stuff from my Google Doc syllabus, which now makes that document and assignment even more manageable for my students and me.

I really like the way my course card turned out, though I kind of wish the more teacher looking person were not a white woman and the student of color wasn't holding the apple card--that kind of bothers me, but it's still kind of a fun image.  I might keep shopping around Canva for an image I like better, since I ended up paying for it for this next month.  I am going to create a welcoming home page for my face to face courses, since we don't meet till Tuesday, so I definitely want to adjust the card image for those two and might find something I can fully get behind.  

I always used the course modules page for my student home page because I thought it was the easiest and most straightforward, but I kind of like the idea of the humanizing home page with more video and imagery, less text, and a quick link to getting started.  I also learned how to use the Canvas buttons, which is super cool and will use these to link the Google Docs to all of those assignment prompts from now on.  It looks nicer than just the ugly link there at the bottom and just makes the course seem more put together.  

I already had a pretty extensive survey at the beginning of all of my classes because our campus still doesn't have a great way of generating meaningful instructor data--the data we get includes all sorts of things, like students who withdraw  at any time for any reason, including incompletes and later grade changes in your failure data, and all kinds of other things that make it hard to use.  If I keep my own data, I know the stories behind that data, and that's more useful for me then.  I know who fails, who withdraws, when, why, etc... and can learn from these and keep trying to make things better.  I can also see which populations seem to be disproportionately flourishing in my courses and think about why that might be and how I could do similar things in different ways for the groups that are not doing as well.

I really like this microlecture, but I'm going to have to supplement it with a lot of instruction in other forms, like an announcement where I fill in some of the gaps I couldn't address in the video.  This assignment also forced me to meet an important need.  I have a quotations quiz that I am now going to replace with a new one.  The other one caused too much confusion and was terrible onerous to grade, so I'm going to use this video, embedded in a page with some additional tips and clarifications to prepare students for an easier version of the quiz with more multiple choice answers that are easier for them to figure out and automatic responses like you did for your quizzes that give more in-depth explanations if they get the answers incorrect.  I'm going to make the quiz worth no points, though, since that will incentivize them to retake it until they are happy with final score.  The 0/0 didn't really do that for me, and I probably would have figured that out and just left my answers as is and moved on to other assignments if we had done more of these--especially with the limited time I had.  I know it's even worse for most of our students, so I'll probably do that part differently.

So back to the lecture.  I think it definitely fulfills the course objective of helping students integrate their sources into their own views, and I think the visuals are engaging.  I used water images to capture a sense of fluidity that we're going for when we integrate quotations.  I did struggle with the lack of options for formatting text in the slides and the limited choices we had for slide formats.  I probably just need to practice more with the tool, but I used the screenshots because I simply could not format the block quotes clearly--everything in the slides that was text was always centered, and I didn't see any way to change that.  I would have just given up and used the Canvas Studio screen shot on a document, but my screenshot video capability on Canvas is not working on either of my computers.  I contacted Dave about this, and he couldn't figure it out either.  It worked one time on my other computer, and then I started having the same problem on that computer too, so I really think it's a glitch with Canvas Studio.  Anyhow, I still think the lecture is useful, and I will instruct them on the page to pause the video and read the example quotes carefully, and then press play, so it's clearer to them what I'm talking about and they can just listen to my explanations instead of trying to listen to my explanations and read the quote examples at the same time. 

All in all, though, I emerged from this course with things I could really use to make my courses more engaging and personable and address some major issues I knew I had with certain parts of my online course immediately.  That's an amazing gift, and I'm very grateful.