Online Tutorial for Designing Effective and Innovative Courses

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Online Tutorial for Designing Effective and Innovative Courses

Is it time to really shake the tree and do something about one of your courses? Do you have a great idea for an innovative course but aren't quite sure where to start in designing it? If so, you might try using the following online tutorial designed to provide practical and effective help for faculty members interested in designing or redesigning a course:

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html

This tutorial is an on-line version of a face-to-face course design workshop developed and taught to literally hundreds of undergraduate faculty in a variety of disciplines for over 12 years by Barbara Tewksbury (Hamilton College) and Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary). While the workshop was originally designed for geoscience faculty, the tutorial provides examples from other disciplines, including those of you outside the sciences, and offers an easy-to-apply strategy for designing courses in any discipline. This tutorial is designed to give you a way to get your arms around what is typically a daunting task and will guide you through a practical, effective strategy for designing or redesigning an effective and innovative course.

Overall philosophy

We believe that a course should do more than provide students with a strong background of knowledge in a field. We believe that a course should enable students to use their strong backgrounds to solve problems, and that a truly valuable course should focus beyond the final exam to add to students' future lives, abilities and skill sets and prepare students to think for themselves in the discipline after the course is over. Designing such a course is a challenge and involves providing not only opportunities for students to master content but also opportunities for students to practice thinking for themselves in the discipline so that they will be prepared to do so after the course is over.

Why use our tutorial?

This tutorial provides a pathway through what can look like a big, amorphous, overwhelming task and presents a logical way to proceed from the glimmer of a good idea toward a new course while avoiding too much blundering in the dark. Using this tutorial lets you avoid wasting energy on reinventing the wheel. We provide links to hundreds of activities that can be used either directly or indirectly as templates, plus examples of goals and syllabi that can be used as catalysts for your own work and that were developed by other faculty.

We know that the design strategy in this tutorial works. Workshop participants comment that our course design process helped them to develop rigorous, effective, and innovative courses and to make thoughtful choices about what and how to teach. In a follow-up survey of workshop participants, 90% of respondents followed through to teach the rigorous, goals-based, innovative course that they had begun to develop at the workshop. Furthermore, 80% of respondents found our course design process so useful that they followed it again when designing or redesigning another course.

Who is this tutorial for?

Most of the examples in this tutorial come from undergraduate courses in the geosciences, although some portions have links to examples from undergraduate courses in other disciplines. Despite the focus on geoscience, the process is generic, and we've used simple examples. If you are interested in designing a course outside the geosciences, you should have little trouble using the tutorial.

The tutorial itself

Course context. Teaching a course involves making choices about what an instructor will ask students to do and why. External factors such as course size, context, student demography, and support structure are significant and should influence the choices that need to be made during course design. We begin the tutorial by having you articulate who your students are, what they need during the course, and what they might need in the future.

Setting overarching goals. The heart of the tutorial involves having you set student-focused goals that enable your students, at an appropriate level, to think for themselves in the discipline, not just expose them to what professionals know. You will set goals that focus your course on developing students' abilities to think for themselves and solve problems in the discipline while still addressing mastery of content.

Setting ancillary skills goals. Before proceeding to content and course plan, you will set one or two ancillary skills goals for your students (e.g., improving writing, teamwork, oral presentation).

Choosing content to achieve overarching goals. Every field is awash in more than a semester's worth of content, and every one of us faces decisions about what content to include and what content to omit. You will make decisions about content by considering what general content topics could be used to achieve the overarching goals you have set for your students, rather than by making a laundry list of content that students should be exposed to.

Developing a course plan. A course plan includes not only the goals and the content topics, but also the order of content and concepts in each broad content topic, and how students will receive goal-related practice with increasing independence as they encounter content and concepts. You will choose appropriate classroom, assignment, and assessment strategies that both help students learn effectively and allow you to evaluate whether students have met the goals.

For Faculty Developers

We now have a complete description of how we run our course design workshops, including links to all of the materials we use to run our workshops, a detailed schedule, tips for adapting or adopting our workshop format, and suggestions for how to use our course design tutorial with faculty. You can find these materials on line at

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/for_developers.html

This course design tutorial is part of a larger web collection of professional development resources developed for undergraduate geoscience faculty through the NSF-funded program On the Cutting Edge ( http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/index.html ).

Preparing a Course: Building a Syllabus

Preparing a Course: Building a Syllabus

From the Center for Teaching Excellence, Kansas University

Start with the basic information of the course, including the year and semester of the course, the course title and number, number of credits, and the meeting time/place. Provide your name, office address (and a map if it’s hard to find), and your contact information. Indicate whether students need to make appointments or may just stop in. If you list a home number, be specific about any restrictions for its use. Next, clarify what prerequisites, knowledge, skills, or experience you expect students to have or courses they should have completed. Suggest ways they might refresh skills if they’re uncertain about their readiness.

When discussing the course, outline the course purpose(s); what is the course about and why would students want to learn the material? Outline the three to five general goals or objectives for the course (see Course design for more information), and explain why you’ve arranged topics in a given order and the logic of themes or concepts you’ve selected. When discussing the course format and activities, tell students whether the class involves fieldwork, research projects, lectures, and/or discussion, and indicate which activities are optional, if any.

In regard to the textbooks & readings, include information about why the readings were selected. Show the relationship between the readings and the course objectives. Let students know whether they are required to read before class meetings. Also detail any additional materials or equipment that will be needed.

Specify the nature and format of the assignments, and their deadlines. Give the exam dates and indicate the nature of the tests (essay, short–answer, take–home, other). Explain how the assignments relate to the course objectives. Describe the grading procedures, including the components of the final grade and weights for each component. Explain whether you will grade on a curve or use an absolute scale, if you accept extra credit work, and if any of the grades can be dropped. Also explain any other course requirements, such as study groups or office hour attendance. Clearly state your policies regarding class attendance, late work, missing homework, tests or exams, makeups, extra credit, requesting extensions, reporting illnesses, cheating and plagiarism. You might also list acceptable and unacceptable classroom behavior. Let students know that if they need an accommodation for any type of disability, they should meet with you to discuss what modifications are necessary.

Include a course calendar with the sequence of course topics, readings, and assignments. Exam dates should be firmly fixed, while dates for topics and activities may be tentative. Also list on the course calendar the last day students can withdraw without penalty. Give students a sense of how much preparation and work the course will take.

Finally, a syllabus is a written contract between you and your students. End with a caveat to protect yourself if changes must be made once the course begins; e.g., “The schedule and procedures in this course are subject to change in the event of extenuating circumstances.” For more information, please see Ombud’s Website.

Resources:

Appleby, Drew C. “How to improve your teaching with the course syllabus.” APS Observer, May/June 1994.

Davis, Barbara Gross. Tools for teaching. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass, 1993.

“Syllabus Checklist.” (2002). Teaching Matters, 6 (1), 8.

This material is drawn from Eddy, Judy. (2001). Creating a Syllabus. Handout.

Preparing a Course: Course Design

Preparing a Course: Course Design
From the Center for Teaching Excellence, Kansas University

Course design involves the planning of curriculum, assessments, and opportunities for learning which attempt to meet to goals of the course and evaluate whether those goals are indeed being met. The designing of a course can be adeptly performed through the use of backwards design, which is based on the principle of working first from the material and concepts you want students to master, in order to plan how you will assess whether this learning has occurred, and this information thus guides which resources and methods of teaching are employed in order to enact learning of this material.

Four questions from Wiggins & McTighe (1998) are suggested as a guide for condensing the course’s material into a few key topics:

1. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process represent a “big idea” having enduring value beyond the classroom?

2. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process reside at the heart of the discipline?

3. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process require uncoverage?

4. To what extent does the idea, topic, or process offer potential for engaging students?

Also consider the goals and characteristics of your future students. Some reasons that students may be taking your course include: to develop a philosophy of life, to learn to interpret numerical data, to understand scientific principles or concepts, to learn to effectively communicate, to learn to organize ideas, or to understand how researchers gain knowledge. As the instructor, you can use this information, along with your own goals for the course, to guide your course structure and teaching pace.

After having determined which material will guide the course design, the next step in backwards design is to establish the criteria you will employ to evidence student learning. Instead of using a lone cumulative exam to assess learning, however, backwards design is guided by the concept that understanding increases across time, as students process, reassess, and connect information. Therefore, assessments to measure this increasing level of understanding should be conducted throughout the semester, using a variety of methodologies such as discussions, tests and quizzes, projects, and assessments in which students analyze their own level of understanding. Once key concepts and assessment criteria have been decided upon, you can then focus on which teaching methodologies and activities you will use to help students reach these course goals. In this manner, teaching is driven by the concepts that are crucial to the course, rather than the course being driving by the teaching methodology itself.

Resources:

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by Design. Merrill Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.