Tip: Time to Build
Tip: Time to Build
Stage 2: Pull the outcomes, assessments, and activities together to create the course structure.
After planning out the outcomes, assessments, and learning activities/course materials, it is time to think about how these components contribute to the overall course structure. How will you pace the learning activities? How will you include formative assessments that are helpful and meaningful for students? What should students do on their own, prior to class, and what happens in class? What is small group work versus whole group work?
Structure
Organization. Many of us organize our courses by weeks in the semester, providing students with a timetable of class meetings, readings for each week, and assignment due dates. It’s a classic approach for many reasons: it largely corresponds to how textbooks are written (one chapter a week), it accounts for university breaks, and it provides students with a big-picture approach to the content. The drawback is that this approach is very content-centered, rather than student-centered. It’s difficult to account for group work, for larger assignments (unless they are broken down into many smaller parts, with due dates assigned to each), and it’s very hard to allow for any flexibility in the timetable model - flexibility that we know benefits students.
Another organization model groups activities by function: how does each activity build on what came before? One method that provides a nice visualization of functional organization is the 5E model: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate. Using this model groups course activities and assessments in a cycle of increasing challenge that isn’t timebound. It is one way to provide the structure about what comes next without setting in stone when that next piece happens from the start of the semester. Once students understand the cycle, they have a sense of what step is next even without a published timetable.
With the flexibility of publishing course materials online, I tend to provide for my students both a time-oriented organization and a functional organization. I have course activities and assessments grouped in thematic chunks in the LMS, and I have an initial schedule of key assignments. I fill in the timetable and adjust as the semester progresses, depending on students’ needs. This allows me to provide structure for students who need more structure, flexibility for students who need more flexibility, and gives everyone an overall big picture arc of the semester. This balance works well for me - and seems to work well for my students - and is much easier to set up with a flexible LMS.
Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching has some interesting ideas about how to organize a course to increase student engagement
While the Univ. of Illinois CITL’s page looks more at design of online courses, but with helpful tips that apply to in-person classes as well (like providing weekly schedules to help students manage their time)
Expectations. The expectations piece really flows naturally from the work I did in planning the course. Once I know what I expect students to be able to do, and how I'll measure whether or not they're able to meet these outcomes, I include information with each assignment to make expectations clear. Here I really love the TILT model, where instructors explicitly outline three key pieces of information with each assignment:
Purpose. Why are we doing this assignment? How does it connect to future learning? What skills and knowledge will the student develop?
Task. What activities should the student do? In what order?
Criteria. What should my finished product look like? How will this work be evaluated?
Syllabus. Designing the syllabus is really connected to the expectations section, above, because the syllabus is where you welcome students to a course and let them know the big-picture expectations for the course. I don't like thinking of the syllabus as a contract, as popular as this view is, so I try to write my syllabi as if they were narratives answering questions about the class, as in the example below.
You can be even more creative still with your syllabus design and presentation, if that fits your teaching style, discipline, and student population.
What comes next?
Teaching! Thinking about instructor presence and how you plan to facilitate the course. The syllabus has started to set the tone for the class, which continues with thinking about communicating with students, encouraging participation, and providing feedback.
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