No Funds? Get Creative!

With all of the funding cuts to education we have to ask ourselves how we can maximize student learning outcomes with the limited resources available. Increasingly, I think that means we turn to digital texts and material and try to utilize them to their fullest potential, thus actually adding value for our students.

This year I am taking that idea to a new level in my classes—and especially in my composition and critical thinking course. I am not just using Moodle as an interactive platform, but will be creating a student-content-based online blog/newspaper. The idea is to show students how writing is a real world activity, how it impacts society, and how all of us can learn to express ourselves clearly and forcefully in order to make the changes we want to see in the world.

While I will be using some traditional books, I am also planning to use free online texts from the Gleeditions Common Core selection. Because they are scholarly editions, nicely formatted, searchable, and free, I can assign a variety of short stories, essays, speeches, poetry, and drama that I have either already planned to use or that, because of the way the course develops naturally, suddenly fit into the content and our discussions. By going digital in this way I can be extremely flexible while saving students money on textbooks. A win-win!

These are challenging times for educators and students alike but we need turn this dilemma into an opportunity to think outside the box and get creative. We have this amazing tool, the Internet, at our disposal and we can utilize it in so many dynamic ways. We now have the potential to not only “go with the flow” of our classes and add reading or supplemental material as the tide shifts, but also to engage students in a setting they are already extremely comfortable in.

I hope that traditional books never disappear, and I hope that education will one day—very soon—get the full funding it deserves. But because of the outrageous cost of textbooks and the uncertainty about funding at present, I am gladly plunging into cyber space head first. I am excited about the possibilities and would love to hear how others are tapping into this tremendous potential.

Please share your ideas here and help all of us turn those blank checks into real money for our students!