MACS 166  – Fall 2013-Spring 2015

View Course Website (Spring 2015)
(includes assignment handouts)

Samples of Student Work  |  Course Syllabus 

This introductory course consisted of 15-25 students per semester and was designed around MIT’s White Paper on 21st century media literacies and participatory culture. While I inherited the course framework, I redesigned my syllabus each semester to update and add assignments, readings, and topics, to experiment with various means of student writing, blogging, and online discussion, and to clarify the focus of the class, which combined the acquisition of skills with a theoretical understanding of media literacy as a concept. I therefore worked to combine conceptual understanding with engaging activities in which students could practice the skills about which they were reading. These included group projects like producing podcasts, conducting a copyright mock trial, and designing a media literacy non-profit and individual assignments like blogging, creating infographics, and editing Wikipedia.  I also took into consideration student feedback and the effectiveness of teaching strategies each semester to improve the class and syllabus, which showed in the increase in teaching evaluation scores each semester. The above website reflects the final iteration of the course.

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Student Evaluations:
(note – first score is for “teaching effectiveness; the second is for “overall quality of course)

Fall 2013: 3.8 / 3.7                 Spring 2014: 4.3 / 4.2
Fall 2014: 4.6 / 4.6                 Spring 2015: 4.7 / 4.6