A Blended Learning Course on Chinese Yue Opera

This is a report of a blended learning course on Chinese Yue Opera that we taught in the fall of 2016. The course is entitled “AS215-Androgyny and Gender Negotiation in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Theatre,” a 200-level course focusing on Yue Opera—a predominately all-female-casted art flourished in the early 20th century in the lower Yangtze River Valley. Yue Opera’s popularity was a product of China’s social changes and the women’s movement. Nurtured by the arts of traditional Chinese opera and modern Western theater and film, Yue Opera reflects the life of Chinese people and women, particularly on the subjects of love, marriage, and family. The project aimed at better meeting the course objectives by incorporating two “blended learning” approaches into the classroom teaching—1) having a theater practitioner contribute to the curriculum and 2) reinforcing learning by utilizing technology. The project goals mainly include: To emphasize writing, critical thinking, and analytical skills by adding the online commentary component; to enrich the curriculum and provide students with some first-hand experience (such as inviting an Yue Opera artist to a campus visit and having her directly interact with the students) and course-tailored learning materials (such as the mini-videos) that students would not have access otherwise; and to build a stronger learning community that goes beyond regular class meetings. Three blended learning components were added to the course, including: 1) having a portion of the class teaching/learning materials assigned to students online, in addition to three one-hour-online-commentaries allocated during class meeting time; 2) creating some mini videos of Yue Opera back-stage preparations (such as costumes, makeup, musical instruments, stage conventions, and training of the young actresses) and these visual materials were integrated into the classroom learning; 3) building a blog/archive site, which includes the selected visual and written materials developed for/in this course. The project tools include: the Moodle course site for class organization and the Moodle-forum for online commentaries; Google Drive Folder for gathering video and written materials; YouTube and iMovie for editing and subtitling the mini-videos; and Wordpress for creating the achieve blog, etc. After discussing the specific components and technological strategies, our report will conclude with the end results of this blended learning project, sharing a student survey and the achieve blog of the project with our audience