My little department is at a point of inflection. We have seen many retirements in the last few years and a couple of new hires — myself included! We also decided to turn our criminal justice concentration into an entire major and change our department name. We are now the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice and offer both majors, as well as the opportunity to dual major or adopt a major/minor combination of these degrees or many others across the university.

This inflection point offers us opportunities to shape our curriculum, and one of the things we have been discussing is, of course, how to best prepare our students for their lives after they leave our classrooms. We have had a lot of discussion about the impact our students will have on the world and the knowledge and skills they’ll need out there. It makes sense that the assessments we use should match the types of knowledge and skills we want them to have. As a result, I have been thinking a lot more about the different ways students can demonstrate knowledge. I think many instructors fall back on standard types of assignments — quizzes, exams, research papers. But most people don’t take exams for a living, and most of our students will never write another APA or ASA-style paper outside of our classes. Why would we place our emphasis on these very narrow types of communication? Why not emphasize, instead, the types of speaking and writing that we more commonly use when we communicate with each other, with decisionmakers, with the general public?

To that end, I’ve been gathering up resources on these types of assignments and assessments. I put the call out to the amazingly generous #AcademicTwitter community, which rose to the occasion. Presented below is just a smattering of the resources that are out there, and I will continue to update this post as more examples roll in! I hope that this is a longstanding resource for the academic community and that you find something here that inspires you.

 

Teaching Resources for Nontraditional Writing/Recording Assignments

Shortcuts: Blogging, Incident Reports, Infographics, Op-Eds, Policy and Research Briefs/Memos, Posters, Podcasts

Blogging

George Couros, 5 reasons your students should blog

Kent State, Assignment Type: Blogs

Kerstin Sailer, Research-based blogging: developing students’ skills

Mark Sample, Pedagogy and the class blog

The Learning Scientists, How to design a blog writing assignment in 3 easy steps

University of Michigan Sweetland Center for Writing, Using blogs in the classroom

Incident Reports

Kent State, Writing a Police Report Narrative

Sacramento State Police Department, Report Writing Manual

 Monash University, Reflective writing and critical incidents

Infographics

Canva (free for educators – use your .edu address)

Piktochart

April Lawrence, The Whats, Whys and Hows of Infographic Assignments

Ashley Pryor, Heidi Appel and Rose Mansel-Pleydell, Infographics Interpretation and Creation

Bree Boppre, Infographic Assignment

Jessica Sowa, Infographic Assignment

 University of Michigan LSA, Infographic Assignments: Blending Creative and Critical

Op-Eds

Boston University, Op-ed Assignment

Harvard Kennedy School, How to Write an Op-Ed or Column

Jessica Sowa, Op-Ed Assignment

Moira Marquis, Writing an Op Ed assignment

Policy and Research Briefs/Memos

Jessica Sowa, Briefing Memo Assignment

Jessica Sowa, Legislative Testimony Assignment

Jessica Sowa, Briefing Video Assignment

Rebecca Kreitzer, Student Authored Policy Briefs

UNC Writing Center, Policy Briefs

Posters

Christina DeJong, Poster Presentations

Podcasts

Aaron Goodman, StoryCorps Interview Assignment [coming soon]

Bret Zawilski, Podcasting in the classroom

 Bret Zawilski, Your final assignment is… a podcast

Chera LaForge, Podcast Assignment

Justic Schell/UMich, Podcasting and audio storytelling research guide

New York Times, Project Audio: Teaching students how to produce their own podcasts

The Teaching Factor, 25 Podcast Assignment and Project Ideas