Rudd and Irani Discuss Their Courses (1:19)

Irani:  The course that I taught was an introductory course in research methods, typically taken by master's students and doctoral students in the College of Agriculture. It's designed to give the students a little bit of what research is like so they can be better practitioners of research and better consumers of research. For that reason, we get students with various levels of experience and various levels of exposure to the research process.

Rudd: The course is designed to teach the students critical thinking skills and develop their dispositions within the context of agricultural issues. Students from a broad range of professions are in the course.  I have several tools that I use to teach critical thinking at a distance in the course.  One being a Web site that we've developed. On the Web site, there are a lot of resource materials from video clips to PowerPoint presentations to articles to read. We have weekly meetings by videoconference, which is kind of an old distance education technology but works out really well. We spend an hour a week to discuss a topic of the week. I give them a topic to discuss, and then we'll come together in a teleconference setting to debate and discuss.