What's Exciting about Course Design?

Eleonora Buonocore

As a teacher and a graduate student, there is nothing that is more exciting to me than the  possibility of designing my own course. I think many of you will agree! We are here because we love to research and to teach, and designing a new class represents the perfect occasion for merging together the two things we love the most.

This is what draw me to course design: I wanted to become good at creating and developing new and exciting courses for my students. I attended an Advanced Teaching Workshop at the Yale Teaching Center on Course Design back in 2013, and since then I started researching techniques for course design, trying to understand what makes an effective course and how to recreate it. This led me to design my own course and then to propose it as part of the Associates in Teaching (AT) program, for which it was approved in the spring of 2014. Co-teaching a new course that my advisor, Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta, and I had designed from the very beginning was an exhilarating experience. We used all of the good practices I learned on Course Design: we began with our goals, designed to be student-centered and focused on active-learning objectives; then we created assessment methods that would reflect our goals; and finally, we selected the best material to match our goals and our assessments. We paid particular attention to varying instructional techniques and to appeal to different kinds of learners: each class period included both a PowerPoint presentation, a reading of the text, a student’s presentation and a student-led class-wide discussion. The course was a success, and the students seemed to enjoy it a lot.

I used my AT experience as a way to stress the possibilities that course design opens up to us. When you put time and effort in designing a course, the students notice it!

But it wasn’t until last semester, when I had the opportunity to run an Advanced Teaching Workshop with my co-facilitator Robert Wickham, that I discovered the full potential of Course Design. Specifically, I understood how its core competencies can be applied to all sorts of disciplines, spacing from the humanities to sciences and the social sciences. It was an eye-opening experience, since I could finally see with my own eyes in action what I always instinctively knew: that good teaching techniques are independent from the discipline you are teaching, and that they are not simply innate skills, but can be learned and reproduced. In short, I learned that you can teach how to teach, and specifically how to design a successful course.

If you were unable to come to our workshop, don’t fret! I will quickly summarize here the most important points that we covered during our workshop…

1. Familiarize yourself with the principle of Backward Design: how to design a class starting from your goals and not simply from the material you want to cover. You can find more information on Backward Design here.

2. I cannot stress enough the importance of goal-setting: set goals for your course at the start, and then set specific goals for each class period. What makes a goal good?  Objectives should be specific, clear, and measurable. In particular, it is useful to formulate your goals in an active-learning and student-centered language. Active verbs help!

3. Understand what possibilities are available as assessments (both formal and informal) for your course, and how your choices in assessment should reflect your goals and should correspond to your choice of materials. On available assessment methods, you can find a list of Classroom Assessment Techniques (CAT) here.

4. Finally, take your time to create a course schedule and to develop an appropriate syllabus! Course design is a time-consuming activity that also requires some breathing time in between the initial idea, the planning stage, and the finalized syllabus creation.

Oh, and there are plenty of resources available online on the subject of course design, so do not forget to check the links offered below:

On goal-setting for your course check out this website from University of Berkeley:

http://teaching.berkeley.edu/learning-goals-0#sthash.XCJAzqLx.dpuf

On Backward Design, check out this evaluation and summary of the excellent book Understanding by Design, by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/

On aligning your assessment methods with your goals, see this website by Carnegie Mellon University:

http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/assessments.html

For a complete guide to course design, consult University of Vanderbilt Center for Teaching website here:

http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/