Anitha Saravanan is an Assistant Professor in the College of Health and Human and Sciences in the School of Nursing. Dr. Saravanan taught an Honors Seminar titled “Social Media: Creation or Destruction of Health?” during the fall 2023 semester.
Why were you attracted to offering an Honors Seminar?
First, I love working at NIU! Next, I love creating new courses. I am also passionate about helping students improve their writing skills. I want prospective students who are looking at colleges to know that at NIU we develop new courses, and these courses provide evidence-based education in health and related fields. I also hope to provide mentorship in writing, research and other scholarly work to Honors students.
How do you teach your subject or specialty to an interdisciplinary group of Honors students?
I include video introductions for the first week that helps me gauge the group of students. I have students anywhere, but not limited to majoring in accounting to education to nursing. Since social media is a common ground for all of us, dialogues are easy to happen. However when students come from a health care background, they will be leading group discussions based on their experiences. But I see that together they all bring their varying experiences of using social media from a health perspective and by reading several peer reviewed articles, and by posting discussion board threads, they learn from each other.
What are some of your tricks of the trade to engage students in the course materials?
I use experiential learning and dialogues. For example, for one assignment, students needed to interview an older adult in the community and share the thoughts of the older adults and their perceptions, biases, and key takeaways. For a discussion board topic, they needed to watch videos and share within their group what they thought was the most important concept and how they thought that this might affect future generations. Since social media is still evolving in terms of its construction and destruction aspects in health of humans, the topic by itself also helped to increase engagement.
What’s the best thing about teaching Honors students?
Honors students are unique in the sense that they are curious, motivated, and proactive. To me, they seem to be natural leaders and teaching and learning with them is a regarding experience. I also see a lot of enthusiasm, great insights, problem solving skills, and a desire to make changes. This makes me want to create and teach more classes.
