Today we worked on our iTunesU course on "Apps for Reluctant Readers". I guess I can see the use of iTunesU, and, once we figured out how it works (and I did really watch the tutorials!) it was easy to use. But the assignment itself was frustrating. It was all about quantity over quality. Must have: at least 20 apps, videos, pictures, tutorials, and text. So we spent the class bundling all these things into our course, without taking any time to check, try or review them. The result is a confusing pile of material, some of which may be good, some of which may be bad...who knows? So I am going to spend some time sifting through and sorting, to get some sort of cohesive structure.
The question that comes to mind is: at what point is it no longer useful to have a "course"? If all of the information is available anyway on the Internet...if anyone who wants to know about "Apps for Reluctant Readers" can just Google it and find some iTunesU courses, some tutorials, some videos, some testimonials about apps...then why would anyone want to take my course? Particularly if my course is chock-a-block full and requires sifting yet again to get to anything useful? If I really wanted to have a course that was useful for my colleagues, I would keep it as simple as possible: A short video background, and six apps: two for phonological awareness training, two for comprehension and organization, and two general compensatory text-to-speech / speech-to-text apps with tutorials on how to use them. And I would make sure that I, as the "author" of the course, really knew all about those six apps.
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