BIS103 is an upper division course where student explore
bioenergetics and metabolic pathways. Metabolism is a topic often
explored in popular media like blogs and social media, so I used an
exploratory writing assignment to not only increase engagement with the
course material but to expose students to trusted online sources in the
popular media sphere. In addition to explaining the structure of the
assignment, I will share survey data about the impact of the assignment
as well as changes I made between quarters. For many quarters, I
provided links to blogs/articles by three vetted content creators.
Recently, I added the option of using their social media posts instead.
Working with Andrew Simon (undergraduate researcher), we discovered that
very few students selected Instagram posts over blog posts. The
following quarter I gave the option to use blog posts vs YouTube videos,
and students were evenly split between the two choices. Andrew
qualitatively coded student responses about why students chose one form
of popular media over the other, which guides me to create assignments
that better reach my goals of integrating popular media with course
content.
