My semester-long Modern World History class for sophomores not only gets to the present, but I try hard to leave a week or so at the end of the course to discuss the future. I ask the students to consider the history of world 25-years out into the future, based on everything they’ve learned over their three semesters of world history. To help them, I give them several articles to read and videos to watch based loosely on the 15 global challenges from the Millennium Project:

Directions

The directions for the assignment are below. Students had to turn in the public URL for their report three times as simple check-ins, following Parts 1, 2, and 3 below.

You are preparing a four-part report:

1. describe the global challenge (both in general terms and with specific sub-challenges),
2. describe the current state of that global challenge,
3. discuss in depth how your global challenge will affect one specific country of your choosing (not the US), and 
4. describe the three best possible solutions to the global challenge

To begin your research, you should look at Global Future Systems (to use, change the drop-down to your selected global challenge). You may also want to use the CIA’s World Factbook or the WHO’s Fact Sheets —in addition to the databases available to you through SI’s library.

Your report should include a significant number of facts and figures from your research, and it should make a persuasive argument in regards to your selected country’s likely future in regards to the global challenge you chose to research.

You will use the Adobe Spark iPad app to create your presentation; the “Avenue of the Giants” sample in the Explore menu is a good example of what your submission should look like. You will submit the URL for your project to this assignment.

• Include maps and relevant pictures
• Include numerous facts, figures, and statistics to support your claims
• Your research should all be cited using hyperlinks.

Exemplar Submissions

Here are five reports by students (in no particular order), produced over nine calendar days:

• Climate Change by Michael H
  
• Status of Women by Mackenzie B
• Status of Women by Katherine P
• Climate Change by Kate A
• Overpopulation by Justin Y

Because my course is based on blended-learning, only two of these days were in-class days; students were released to research and prepare their reports – and read articles and watch videos on several topics – for four days.

When reports were finished, students were grouped by topic (all the Overpopulations got together, all the Clean Waters huddled up, etc) to prepare an oral report on their topic for the rest of the class — which took notes on these oral reports in their physical notebooks. There was a paragraph-length question on the Final exam asking students to discuss two of the global challenges from this unit.

Reflection

Personally, I really like how this turned out. Students explicitly mentioned in class that they liked learning about the current world and that they felt invested in the project because it investigated real problems and real solutions. That speaks to engagement as a function of relevance. I also liked how the report ended up looking; Adobe Spark produced a good looking product — easily. The report could just as easily have been done in Pages on their iPads, but I like how Spark makes the report so sharable. One thing to work on for next year though is actually sharing these reports beyond the class…