Looking Into the Efficacy of the Course Construct

Class Anatomy Snapshot »





Project Snapshot »

Barbara Gayle, a CASTL Scholar and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Portland, used the class anatomy template to represent her students' development in a public speaking course. Rather than using the snapshot to focus on a single class, Gayle uses it to track students' growth by presenting videos of the four presentations that students produced during the course and by providing her reflections and analysis through journal selections. Although Gayle had never produced a website before, she was able to produce this snapshot in a matter of days. Similarly, when the snapshot tool was introduced to Gayle and her colleagues in the CASTL Program at a week-long meeting in the summer, ten of the twenty-eight scholars used it to produce their own web-based snapshots.

By enabling Gayle and her colleagues to put their examinations of their teaching online, the snapshot tool also gave them an opportunity to grapple with the issues of compression and representation that they would never have addressed had they created more conventional and linear forms of publication and presentation. As a result, they had to figure out how to present their ideas in a much more succinct and focused way than they were accustomed to doing. More than an exercise in editing, this process led several scholars to rethink the framing of their key questions and results. For others, developing the web-based representations helped them to identify artifacts, materials, and evidence that were missing from their initial analyses. Barbara and other CASTL scholars' experiences in using the Snapshot Tool suggest that these kinds of tools may do more than reduce the complexity of creating web-based representations—they may also amplify faculty members' capacity to investigate their teaching and students' learning.