SIGI Course Transformation

Dr. Joy Fagan, an Assistant Professor of Bible at Cedarville since 1994, approached the Center for Teaching and Learning for help in the summer of 2006. Dr. Fagan teaches a class on Scriptural Interpretations of Gender Issues (SIGI), and was hoping to find a more effective way to help her students think through the issues on their own and engage with them on a deeper level. Through collaboration with her, we developed a plan to transform the course with online technology.

In the fall of 2006, Dr. Fagan taught the course in a traditional face-to-face classroom setting. In the spring, we launched a hybrid version of the class that allowed students to journal and discuss the material online after meeting with her in a traditional classroom at the beginning of each week. Even as the hybrid course was successfully underway, we built on the experience to work with her toward the next step in the process, placing the course completely online for the summer session. We structured the course around a weekly unit and built a multimedia module for each unit to present the material that Dr. Fagan had previously delivered in the class. The challenge at this stage was to deliver the content to students online without loosing the valuable face-to-face contact between Dr. Fagan and her students. To meet this challenge, we recorded ten to fifteen minute video clips of Dr. Fagan as a capstone for each unit, summarizing and pulling together the key points. The transformation from a traditional classroom course to a fully online learning experience, a process which took less than a year, is now complete.