Courses make up a curriculum, but neither should be just one thing after another. To be memorable, a course of study, a semester, a degree program should have a shape, just the way a good story has a shape. That way, study becomes an experience, with particular aspects of the experience that can stay with you long after the last class meeting, long after the term is done, long after graduation.

Alumni associations know all about this. Class reunions are typically organized by year of graduation. Why? What does a class of 2024 engineering major have to do with a class of 2024 English major? Alumni associations understand the power of we were in this together.

That sense of togetherness can be cultivated in all sorts of ways: athletics, Greek life, residence halls, clubs, co-curricular activities, and many others. If the degree program has a capstone course requirement–for example, a senior seminar–the sense of shared experience is often heightened in this particular course as well.

Obviously, online learning presents some challenges in this regard. With an asynchronous class, the sense of shared experience is potentially diminished. Without that sense, it can become harder to stick with the course when the workload mounts up. There’s little sense of a beginning or ending, aside from deadlines along the way. These are large generalizations, I know, but the research on retention in online learning suggests they’re not without a basis in fact.

Synchronous online learning, the modality I vastly prefer, offers a better chance of finding and amplifying that sense of shared experience–indeed, a chance for a real meeting with learners present to each other. Yet the virtuality of it all, webcams and chat back-channels notwithstanding, can devolve into “we’re all brains in vats here,” with a corresponding diminishment of a sense of real presence upon which shared experience can be grounded.

The challenge, then, is to give a shape to each meeting, then give a shape to those shapes as the course of study continues. And as any storyteller will testify, the ending of the story makes the story not only complete but enduringly influential. It doesn’t just … stop. It ends.

I do many things in my teaching to help shape the experience, class meeting by class meeting. When the pandemic hit, though, and classes went fully online, both the crisis and the modality inspired me to make the last day of class truly memorable, an ending that would bring the entire shape of our experience before our eyes. I’d structured my synchronous online class meetings as little dramas, little podcasts or radio shows. Why not do a “highlights reel” for the last day? And why not make my “digital farewell” gift to my students the climax of an entire “digital gift” session in which, one by one, students brought some kind of “farewell” for the classmates who’d been on the journey with them. A kind of show-and-tell, but one that capped an entire semester of shared experience, most of it synchronous.

I’ve described the process elsewhere in some detail, but for the first time here I’m sharing one of those farewell “movies.” I made this one for my Reading Film section in the Fall, 2023 term, but I’ve made similar farewells for my other online classes. Students generally respond with great enthusiasm, and sometimes with tears (they tell me). I too find the tears coming as I assemble the elements, especially the images from the students’ forum avatars or blog sites.

No tears in the teacher, no tears in the learners, to paraphrase Robert Frost. Maybe you had to be there. I hope, though, that the little gift below illustrates some of what I try to do in this area of what we call “learning design.” My design aims to be a movie we’ve made together, with the opportunity to look back at the end and say, look where we’ve been, look what we’ve done.

I hope you enjoy it.

Note: Although most students choose pseudonyms and meme-style images for their Forum identities, I’ve taken care to redact any personally identifiable information.