Summer classes are under way at UW, and I'm teaching two classes during a three-week session. Online Journalism is in the morning, and Graphics of Communication is in the afternoon.
The three-week classes are kind of an endurance race - can students and faculty last three hours, 10 minutes per class Monday through Friday for three weeks? Can you cram in everything you'd cover during a normal 15-week semester into 14 days (no classes on Memorial Day)?
My observations after years of teaching in summer is that students actually learn better in three weeks than in 15. I base that on anecdotal evidence as well as on their actual performances.
For instance, last summer in Online Journalism, the average final grade was 85.3 percent. This spring, the average in the same class was 82.5. I didn't run a statistical analysis on the grades to see if they were significantly different, but judging by the gap, I'm willing to bet they were.
What accounts for the difference, I think, is that students are only taking one class during summer and are able to focus all of their attention on that single subject. During a regular academic semester, full-time students are taking 4-6 classes and their energies have to b e divided among all of those courses.
While summer classes can be intense, they also seem to be better learning experiences. Higher education should consider revamping the old semester system into three-week sections, during which students would take just one class in each section.
That is how they do it at Colorado College, called the block system.
ReplyDelete