https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LtQD7yxuewlumK9JQhtuAfE2nVWI_8NbICQmFplee4s/edit

The topic of the course created by pod 8 is “Making Decisions Like an Economist”, which is a course about economy. There are three interactive activities in their course. In the first activity, the students are asked to watch a video and complete the practice on Macmillan Learning. The goal of this activity is to help the students understand and apply the concept they learned to different situations. In this activity, I find that their group members has considered the difficulty of ELL and take some measures. According to them, the platform they use for watching the video has closed caption to help the students understand the content. Also, the students can use the speed modifier to slow down the video so that they can keep up with the instructors. I am an English language learner myself, so I can really understand the difficulties they meet when they try to understand some new concept taught in English. There is no doubt that the caption will help a lot when they try to understand the technical terms for economics.  In the second activity, the students are asked to read an article and compose a post responding to the article. They also provide a translated version of the article for ELL. The last activity is to do a presentation, which I think is the most important activity of the course. This activity is practical and helpful because the students will analyze the problems themselves and apply what they have learned to solve the problems like  economists. During the activity, there will be a TA to help ELL students organize the script before they start their presentation. For those who loses their hearing, they will be mainly evaluated by their paper work. The members of pod 8 claim that they are using Inquiry-based Learning, which I suppose is reasonable. Economy is a practical subject, which means that we should apply the knowledge we learned to daily life. Also, when we find the economic problems in the society and then learn the knowledge to solve it, we will be more purposeful and motivated. 

I also have some suggestions. In the first place, I think it better if you can be more specific about the goal of your course. When the students are choosing their courses, they must want to know what they can learn in the course and what they can get after the course. So you need to set up some goals of the course and then design the learning activities according to them. Next, for the learning activities, the first and second activities are great. You fully consider the difficulties of ELL and those who lose their hearing. The ELL can get assist from the caption of the video and the translated version of the article. Also, for those who lose their hearing, they can focus on the caption of the video to understand what it is talking about, and they will not be affected by hearing when they are reading articles. However, as the most important part of the course, I think they need to engage in the third activity. Maybe you can consider making some adaptations of the activity. What is more, you can be more specific about assessment, which is essential of the course. For example, you can explain how you will grade the students, that is, the standard of your assessment. The criteria for grading should be consistent with the purpose of learning.