Pope-Ruark earns course redesign grant

Grant will enable students to quickly generate video case studies for peer review.

Rebecca Pope-Ruark – Assistant Professor – English

On Friday, March 6 Instructional Design and Development (ID&D) at Elon University awarded Rebecca Pope-Ruark, assistant professor of English, a $1,000 grant to implement a technology initiative with the purpose of advancing teaching and learning.

Recently the flip video camera, dubbed the easiest camera to use, has empowered many with rapid video creation. Pope-Ruark plans to harness that power to transform the ENG 215 “Introduction to Professional Writing and Rhetoric” course. This course uses written case studies to help students visualize theoretical concepts in the discipline. To more fully engage students in the case process, Pope-Ruark will redesign the course to have students react to multi-genre (written and video) cases, generate their own video case studies and have their peers respond and react to the production. Flip video cameras will be an essential tool in this process.

The process of generating a case study, whether hypothetical or researched, will enable students to participate actively in a variety of complex rhetorical environment and build important rhetorical skills related to situation, ethos, audience awareness, purpose and presentation of information. Pope-Ruark believes having students create their own cases and sharing them with their peers “will be really transformative in the class.”

Flip Camera from Pure Digital Technologies (www.theflip.com)