Use of PBS videos as course material.
These are not college level.
Discussion and study questions are not simply general, they are absurd.
The most you can do with them is come to some half-reasonable generalization, when the point of a college level course would be to criticize such generalizations and move beyond them.
Readings too advanced and specialized for an introductory level course.
They are interesting to me but I know how to contextualize them. For an introductory course, though, these bomb as self-study materials … especially given the inanity of the discussion and study questions, and the gap in level between them and the PBS videos.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I see this in teaching material a lot. It starts out simple and then gets too complex. A lot of my math teachers made this mistake, which is why I never mastered math. I needed explanations, strategies, etc. etc. Language textbooks are often like this, too.
The middle ground is where the teaching needs to be strongest. Everyone can master the basic material, and advanced students can study on their own, but people struggling to learn need a lot of help.
These are good points and it is very true about language textbooks.
Since I didn’t attend the live session, did he contextualize at all Miller’s article? Otherwise, for most students, it would seem unrelated.
No, live session was just that meet-and-greet that I took notes on on Facebook as it happened.
I’ve used the Black in Latin America series in class before – but after we’ve talked about some frameworks for talking about race (yay for critical race theory) and have a good grounding in history. It’s a great text to teach against. But the way it’s presented is like I alluded to over at Spanish Prof’s – there is no contextualization! And I wonder if the dependence on PBS is due to the course being in English and needing available resources? Not as an excuse, but as possible explanation.
In a perverse way it’s comforting to see how what I do in the classroom really does matter and really is different from what the MOOCs are peddling.
(Full disclosure: I still haven’t looked at the readings – my other work takes priority!)
The Black in Latin America series is a lot better than that When Worlds Collide thing … which apparently also has two ads from Goldman Sachs.
There is a huge amount of reading material in English on Afro-Latin topics and there is much film documentary and so on with English subtitles.