Getting started with course development

Every project starts with an intent. This one was no different. I consider the design of a new course a project. In the old days my approach to designing a course was to select a textbook that came with overheads (nowadays that is either a CD or a webpage with PowerPoint files and a bank of test questions) and I was done. I have to admit, that I too took the road of least resistance and thought that I was solely responsible for transmitting information to the students. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to, because that had been modeled to me my entire life in education. Even in my first year as a faculty member, I was told to sit in on a class taught by a "master teacher" who portayed just that model.

But designing a learning-centered course is much more than picking a textbook for convenience. I intended to develop a course for graduate students that would help them learn more about teaching and develop a "reference of correctness" about teaching and learning that was more than "teaching = delivering information." In other words, I wanted this course to help Teaching Assistants realize that good teaching is not just lecturing by the "sage on the stage" who then leaves the students to their own devices to figure out what all that information really means.

Bill McKeachie suggest to start the development of a course at least 3 months prior to teaching it. I started developing this one towards the end of the spring semester 2009, as it would be taught in the Fall of 2009.

As a starting point I used a class I taught on teaching and course design for doctoral students in the College of Health Sciences during the previous two fall semesters. I had been succesful and I thought I could roll that course over into a seminar for our teaching assistants. I was wrong!


From early comments on the draft syllabus I shared with my collaborators, it was clear that my focus was too much on course design and the theories behind teaching and learning. Masters and new PhD teaching assistants, especially those who have not taught before, clearly have very different concerns. A survey of their needs and personal communications made very clear. I had to change my approach significantly, and started focusing on the basic elements of teaching such as developing a lesson plan, public speaking skills, starting a discussion and facilitating it, basic class management strategies, etc.


I reread some of the classic books on teaching such as McKeachie's Teaching Tips, and Linda Nilson's Teaching at its Best, and reflected on my own experiences and strategies of 22 years in higher education.


Let me digress for a moment and tell you a bit about my learning styles, because they help explain how I go about conqueringt the challenge of designing a course. According to the Felder and Soloman Index of Learning Styles my prefered learning styles are Active, Sensing, Visual, and Global. In other words, I focus on the big picture, then jump in, and muddle around with stuff before I develop a detailed structure. It probably drives others crazy, because in the early phases I change things a lot and that happened in this case as well.

Focusing on the big picture first, I started developing the body of the syllabus. That was the easy part, because after my discussions with the other folks I was pretty clear on what the course needed to accomplish. Using the model developed by Dee Fink (2003) I laid out the basic elements of the course based on what I believed the students needed to be able to DO after they completed the learning experiences I would present to them in this course.

Finally, developing a course is very much a research project, so I tapped into the resources available to develop the most appropriate outcomes and the best possible learning experiences for the students. Having never taught this type of course, my work was based on one big hypothesis: "Based on my studies I think this will work, but I will have to conduct the experiment to see if it does."

Continued in the next episode :)