Course Description

Course Description

Course Description

Project Based Learning Mini Course

Geography and Travel

Class Times: Mondays 2:00-3:50

Location: Pacific 113 

Instructor: Courtney Cunningham

Email: cbc@uoregon.edu

Office hours: by appointment

Project Based Learning

Project based learning is a “hands-on” teaching and learning method that centers on making or doing something. Typically students work in pairs or groups to decide what they want to do and how to go about doing it. Often the project is digital. There is usually some final product that is shown to the group or to the world. The English language skills you need to complete the projects become important. Students feel motivated to do their best and learn what they need to know.

Geography

A sense of place is important. In this class you will develop a digital project aimed at geography or travel. The project is intended to be a promotion, advertisement, or inspiration for people thinking of travelling to that location. The location can be a single place (a theater trip to New York City, Beijing China , the Pyramids of Egypt) or it can be a trip through many places located near each other (a bus trip to the US west coast, a bike vacation through the south of France). A theme is a nice way to tie your trip together: a theater trip, a surfing vacation, a culinary expedition.

Projects

Although you will have much room for choice in choosing projects, we will support multimedia projects using some or all of the following tools: power point, digital audio, digital video, websites, web based maps, digital photographs, digital slideshows, narrated stories, and website development.

You will be introduced to several mini projects so that you have the ideas and tools to create a larger project. The mini-projects may include the following.

Mini-Projects:

Photo album or narrated slideshow

Audio recording/music manipulation

Video production and integration

Basic website development

Week by week (this is an estimate, and depending on projects chosen may change)

Week 1: Introduction to the course, research destinations

Week 2: Planning the Itinerary
Week 3: Working with pictures, creating a poster or travel blog

Week 4: Working with video: creating a movie

Week 5: Final Project Formation

Week 5: Work on final projects

Week 7: Final Project Showcase – All projects should be finished and ready to be shown to the class.

The final project showcase

The last day of class will be a showcase day. Your job will be to present what you did to the class for about 10 minutes. You will talk about what you did, who it is for, why you did it, and what you learned.

Grades:

Attendance: 10%

Participation: 10%

Mini project completion: 20%

Final project: 40%

Project showcase talk: 20%