Syllabus Concept Map

A response to the Syllabus Concept Map Activity
created by Rachel Schultz (@Rachel Schultz)

Number of views: 243

My Group Dynamics course comes with established course outcomes in outline format, so I tried to convert it to a mind map and found it wasn’t the best way to organise such a dense list of topics, especially once I started making connections between bubbles. Students teach themselves the content in a highly structured environment, and I have seen them use mind maps to present one of the outcomes, for example. However, most students don’t come to this approach on their own. I have some questions about the accessibility of mind maps this dense, as they are hard to show all at once (even on a large monitor) and I know about half our students are accessing course content on their cell phones. How would a screen reader handle all the sub-points and connections? All the Prezi style zooming to see specific sections of the map make me motion sick, so I wouldn’t use them in a classroom.  I’d say mind mapping might work for personal planning if one were a visual learner or writing a course outline from scratch (a technique I’ve used in the past), or for a specific subtopic, but I’m still unconvinced a mind map of a syllabus is the best application of this type of tool.