Background

Even though I teach post-secondarily, the majority of my students are in need of strategies to help them with reading, communication, and executive skills.  The majority of my students do not read for pleasure except for short articles online and this hampers them in their ability to read patiently through longer pieces as well as write well. Additionally, my students often need help with skills like meeting deadlines, making sure they have their work for class, being able to check their own grades and how to use various functions in our learning management systems, tutoring systems, and student information systems. They often do not how to ask for help or where to go for help.

In addition, the majority of my students have complex lives outside the classroom.  While about half of the students are traditional, the other half are non-traditional students. They have families, jobs, and may even be caretakers for their parents.  Some people have just finished high school (traditional-age) and are familiar with computer resources for writing and researching.  Some people haven’t written a paper for 30 years (some GED students) and still think of methods of writing and researching as something done on index cards while physically in a library.  There are other factors to consider:  students’ motivation is mixed and most are performance-oriented instead of mastery-oriented (National Research Council [NRC], 2000).

Many of our students do not have their own computers. However, between laptops, smartphones, and tablets, most students do have access to a device. While this project started with the idea of smartphones in the classroom, I decided to expand to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to capture all of the devices that students might bring. (Hopefully, this allows me to cast the widest net in terms of people walking in a classroom with a device. Economic difficulties for students can also be seen in some students not buying textbooks.  Some students can just barely afford the class themselves, and then they balk at buying some the textbooks in Humanities, which range from $65 – $200.

The classes that this BYOD curriculum will serve are the Humanities classes.  I am going to start out with American Folklore (HUM 350) as the test class and then attempt to generalize the curriculum to other Humanities classes.

War Gardens for Victory

(The World War II propaganda [myth] that was behind people helping the war effort by growing their own food.

Problem

What this project aims to do is to remove many of the obstacles from both individual and collective work in the classroom by having students BYOD to a face-to-face class. (Online is a whole other dimension that cannot be covered within the scope of this project.)

In addition to offering scaffolding devices for students, one aim is to find online resources that can be used in addition to the textbook, especially in early weeks. While hopefully every student will buy a reasonably-priced textbook, it would really benefit both instructors and students if the first week’s resources were online and immediately available.

With obstacles of access to technology and  resources removed, the desired outcome is that students will have more time and energy to spend on deeply engaging in the lessons and materials of the class. Disengagement and hopelessness can derive from students not only feeling that they don’t have the skills for the class (Rose, 1989) and from not being able to obtain necessary materials for the class.