another experiment in open pedagogy

Last spring was such an amazing experience using the principles of open pedagogy to teach my Org Behavior class that I wanted to implement some of the lessons I learned this semester again. This course is "management of a healthcare organization", so it's a bit narrower than Org Behavior, but it still provides a fertile field.One complication: I have 50 students this semester, last semester I had 13.

Nevertheless, I am plowing forward using two open assignments as part of my course: the students will be blogging, and the students will be writing another primer.

Blog:

The assignment is to create a blog and post one, 200+ word post each week, related to something about health management. 

This isn't really the exciting part, though. What is exciting is I have recruited 34 healthcare professionals who work in management to read the blogs and comment on them. Each reader has been assigned three students, so that each student has two professionals reading their work, plus me. Hopefully that will provide them a sense of writing for an audience, rather than just writing into a vacuum (or writing just to finish the assignment).

Primer:

With 50 students, I have assigned them to teams of four and told them they will be writing a chapter in a book about the management of healthcare organizations. I'm going to focus on them on organizational units or functions - Department of Nursing, Human Resource Management, or FQHCs. We'll see what they sign up for! I am looking forward to another amazing product.

I'm excited. I hope these open ped concepts work well for them and give them the opportunity to explore and grow.