Design Bite
Assignments & Student Choice
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Description
Years ago at my previous school, I taught a digital storytelling class in which students had to explore narrative using a variety of digital tools. Before I started teaching it, my colleague Jim had taught it and created 10-12 media assignments. When we started teaching it together, we decided to do something different. We created an online assignment bank that allowed anyone in the class community (which extended beyond the credit-bearing course) to submit assignment ideas. Each assignment would also receive a star rating based on its difficulty. Then, on any given week, we would assign a certain number of stars of work that had to be completed. Students could choose which assignments to do to meet the requirement.
The assignment bank is still live (https://assignments.ds106.us/) and has over 1000 media assignment ideas!
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Reflection
As a design choice, the ds106 Assignment Bank really allowed us to lean into the idea of student agency. We had to let go of the notion that we were the best source of ideas for student work and invite anyone in the community to take on that challenge.
Did it mean that occasionally some low-quality assignment ideas got proposed. Yes. (and sometimes in between semesters we would go in and remove these). Did it mean sometimes students “got away” with doing a bit less work than we had intended for that week. Yep.
But far more often we saw
* Students create incredible things because they got to choose what to work on
* Students take on harder projects because they saw that others had done so and been successful (the Assignment Bank website also syndicates work completed by others in the community so you can see how others have tackled an assignment idea)
* Students coming up with brilliant assignment ideas that became some of the most popular ones in the community
* Students taking on MORE stars than assigned in a given week because they were having fun, felt inspired, and wanted to keep going.