The purpose of this chapter is to document the transformation of a blended, high school Humanities course to a virtual course that maintains a strong academic focus and preserves the core values of a human-centered education. The authors share the process of redesigning the course content, learning activities, and assessment, using specific examples from their experience and their research. The authors evaluate their experience by presenting the challenges and benefits of this undertaking. Ultimately, the goal of the authors is to assure that the Humanities Program at the American Community Schools Athens will continue to adapt to the digital world, making wise use of educational technology to provide our students with a broad, humanistic, liberal arts education that will serve them well in any field of endeavor.
TopDesigning A Humanities Course The I2flex Way
We describe how we first met this challenge in the chapter “The Humanities Program: An Innovative Classic” (Jasonides, Karvouniaris & Zavacopoulou, 2016) which was included in the book Revolutionizing K-12 Blended Learning through the i2Flex Classroom Model (Avgerinou & Gialamas, 2016). The chapter documents how we redesigned the Humanities course in two separate formats, one format to meet the needs of students enrolled in the year-long ACS Diploma course and another format to meet the needs of a wider range of students who are not enrolled in the year-long course but are interested in taking Humanities as an enrichment course that focuses on preparing them for an 8-day field study experience.
The ACS Diploma Course and the Enrichment Course shared the same core values: a liberal arts education delivered through a team-taught, interdisciplinary approach that includes Literature, History, Art, Philosophy and Music. In each course the essential question “What Makes Us Human” remained as the guiding force, and the field study experiences continued to support the authenticity of our exploration of this question. In both courses the content remained focused on the influence of Greece in Western Civilization. However, the Humanities Enrichment course presented this in less detail, since it was not a year-long course and it was focused on preparing students for an 8-day field study trip to either France or Italy.
The major challenge, of course, was redesigning learning activities based on what we thought would work best in the Face-to-Face classroom and which activities could work better in an independent but teacher-guided online session. We began by redesigning the Moodle platform so it was set up more like websites familiar to students. In the ACS Diploma course we used the Face-to-Face sessions as a way to develop critical thinking through group and class discussions of the ideas they explored during the online learning sessions. Finding or designing our own engaging but also effective online learning activities became even more challenging in the Humanities Enrichment course since it was delivered completely online except for the culminating field study experience. Over the years we included a variety of effective online learning activities in the Humanities courses, and we continued to explore virtual learning activities and digital educational tools that might be useful in helping us maintain the core goals of the Humanities course.
TopOne Step Further
In the spring of 2019 we took one step further in our journey when we began to consider how to redesign the Humanities Enrichment course so that it could be accepted by ACS Virtual, a new online program that was beginning its first year with a variety of authentic high school courses offering ACS high school credit. We decided to make this next step for several reasons. Not only did we want to support the ACS Virtual initiative, but we also saw this as an opportunity to create a more academically challenging, completely virtual Humanities course for students whose class schedules cannot accommodate the regular i2flex Humanities ACS Diploma course. We also considered the future possibility of expanding the Humanities program beyond ACS Athens, and perhaps beyond Greece.