While I was an instructor, I strove to use technology effectively. For me, this means employing or creating online resources when it improves the student and teacher experience within a class. As more classes switch to partially or entirely online, the effective use of technology to supplement face-to-face meeting time becomes more and more important.
This was particularly important during the summer of 2020, when I taught English etymology online due to COVID-19. I employed online activities and a short YouTube series of extra materials to engage students and improve course outcomes.
A major project on which I took the lead was a revamp of UCLA’s hybrid First Year Latin program. Based on my experience teaching the course, as well as that of other instructors, we felt strongly that the existing course was not as effective as possible for ensuring student learning. Based on our experiences and direct feedback from past students, I produced a large number of materials now used in new iterations of the course. The results so far have been quite promising. Sample materials can be found below; more will be made available soon.
Lecture Videos – Over 100 short online lecture videos were produced using iMovie, explaining important concepts in Latin. Here is a sample video on Dactylic Hexameter, a metrical pattern of syllables used in some Latin poetry.
Online Vocabulary Course – To aid student retention of vocabulary, I produced a Memrise vocabulary course for the textbook. Memrise has users review vocabulary at intervals chosen to aid long-term memory. As of March 31, 2019, the course has had 103 users.
Online Morphology Quizzes – Each hybrid Latin course now comes with a set of self-test quizzes designed to allow students to practice producing Latin noun and verb forms. Using a Python script, I automated the generation of nearly 5,000 practice questions in an XML format readable by Moodle, UCLA’s Learning Management System. This reduced the time that would be required to produce these questions from weeks to a few hours. The script and a sample output can be found at https://github.com/bniedzie/latinquestions.