Professor Devin Joshi: Using DU Course Media to encourage critical thinking
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I use a video clip in almost every class to help stimulate discussion. I teach about foreign countries that most of my students have never visited so I use this media to help give them a visual and audial sense of what is happening around the world. The students are assigned readings on particular topics, and the videos are chosen to complement the readings. They may be related but have some important difference, such as showing a contrast or how an issue from the reading plays out in a different country. We can then focus our discussions on comparing and contrasting the examples. For example, when we were covering the topic of child labor, I chose video clips that demonstrated different types of government interventions and how international organizations deal with the issue. By watching these vivid examples as a class, our discussions can focus on analyzing the similarities and differences in approaches.
I find that watching an hour-long movie or documentary is too much time to spend in class, so I prefer using DU Course MediaTM to make clips. I may show about 20 minutes of a video, but I mainly use class time for discussion. However if the students are interested they can view the videos in their entirety at home. I'm a big fan of DU Course MediaTM for the convenience it allows. I do not have to set up a DVD or VCR for each class. I can create the clips ahead of time and it is all there on the Internet ready to go. I can be in the middle of a PowerPoint lecture and immediately shift to DU Course MediaTM if needed. Or, if I am away at a conference I can still plan for class by making my clips on the Internet. I think it's a wonderful tool to stimulate class discussion.
Devin K. Joshi, Josef Korbel School of International Studies
DU Course MediaTM