Too many choices are an effective form of paralysis

Today's daily blog post from Seth Godin contrasted choice vs. convenience. Convenience tends to limit choices while choice is almost infinite (if you are willing to spend the time, money, or power to get what you want).

Financial convenience pushes most of us to invest in the short term, for example, so most people opt for something cheaper even if there are much better long-term options. Intellectual convenience encourages NOT taking risks or making even simple changes.

This is the time of year where I spend some time idly wondering about changes in what I teach and how I teach, in texts and sites that might connect better with students, and with entirely new lesson strategies. After all, there is no one way to teach or grade or motivate. There is no "cookbook recipe" to rely upon for success.

Today I am thinking about the proper balance between offering opportunities and mandating opportunities for online college students -- now my only regular teaching situation. Another way to think of this is juggling extrinsic motivation with intrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation is the ultimate goal for most education. It shouldn't take some ghostly presence somewhere south of Denver to get students writing clearly and stylishly. Producing strong prose can be its own reward and receiving a grade or rating on our writing shouldn't make a big difference in what we create.

But it does... for the vast majority of people and certainly college students. 

I am trying to incorporate some new essays into the Composing Arguments course I teach for Metro State, drawn from some open access textbooks recommended by a study committee at the university. They would complement the many essays and memoirs and reports I have gathered over the years that function as models of good writing and thinking.

When teaching an online course, some level of trust between instructor and student must be present. I will never converse with any of my online students in person, never sit down and engage in a back-and-forth conversation. I will never really know if a student read the text or watched the video or listened to the podcast.

As far as checking for understanding (in education talk), my only recourse is to require/mandate some sort of quiz or reaction to a specific paragraph or claim or figure of speech. Those checks must come with some sort of extrinsic "reward" -- like points -- or we are back simply hoping that students find the time to do the reading and thinking we believe will be helpful.

At some point I will need to decide how extensive my checks for understanding must be (a quick and superficial quiz or an in-depth analysis or something in between). 

But what slows me down is making choices about what to require. After all, it is much more convenient (for me) to stick with articles and essays that I have used before. I am "expert" in those, and the documents are already formatted. 

There are countless potential models of good writing and thinking I could share. No one can be expert in them all.

In the next couple weeks I will be sorting readily available choices and devising checks for understanding that add information (as opposed to drain the students of all motivation). 

If you happen to be a Metro student this spring in my section, you will get to be the judge of how it works out.