Coming up with different assignments that will motivate students and enhance their learning experience can be a big challenge. Here is an idea that may help you though.

As a chemistry lecturer I asked the students to find a chemistry related YouTube video and upload it to Moodle, the college learning management system, using the “glossary” function. (If you don’t have a learning management system you can set up an educators account on the free social bookmarking tool – Diigo.)

The one stipulation was that the students had to check that their chosen video was not already uploaded onto Moodle by a colleague. The students then rated each video, in accordance with specified criteria, with the average rating used as the grade for the student for that assignment. With over 80 students in that particular class each student watched over 80 chemistry related videos.  Despite the standard of video chosen varying dramatically, the enthusiasm for this chemistry assignment expressed by the student was immense. The only impact personally was to quickly check that each video chosen was appropriate i.e. contained no explicit material. At the end of semester as a lecturer I was then able to keep decent videos that the students had found for future years.