Posts Tagged ‘course design’
March 17 - Instructional Design Strategies for Freshening Up Your Course
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
This week I’m writing articles for an upcoming issue of The Teaching Professor newsletter and that always prompts lots of reading, thinking, rethinking and revising. Two articles I’m highlighting for the March issue begin with instructional problems, plagiarism in one and poorly written lab reports in the other, which are addressed by thoughtful and creatively designed assignments. With the plagiarism problem, it’s a brand new assignment and with the poorly written lab reports, it’s a complete redesign of the lab report assignment.
August 19 - The Three Big Questions Faculty Need to Ask
By: Mary Bart in Curriculum Development
The growth of knowledge within your discipline is what makes being a professor so exciting, but it also presents new challenges–particularly when it comes to teaching. Because the time allotted for each course remains constant and the content that could be included in any course continues to grow, you may find it difficult to try to cram all this information into a course.
August 16 - Nine Ways to Customize Learning Experiences
By: Mary Bart in Instructional Design
In every course there are certain core concepts and principles that are important for each student to learn, develop into useful knowledge, and apply appropriately. What’s not important is how they learn these core concepts.
June 14 - The Role of the Text in Course Planning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning, Teaching Professor Blog
As you plan a new course or revise an existing one, when do you decide on a text? I worry that many of us make that decision early on and then use the text to anchor our course design decisions. What gets included in the course as well as how it’s presented are often strongly influenced by what’s in the text and how it’s presented there. As the authors below point out, that’s not the role the text should be assuming in course planning.
April 2 - Learning from Experience: How Teaching is Like Golf
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Faculty Development
Management professor David A. Whetten, who now directs a faculty development center, admits with honesty that for some years he didn’t think there was much he could learn from people who “studied” education. After all, he was in the classroom doing education and had learned much from that experience. In a wonderful piece [see reference below] he explains how a conversation with his golf instructor resulted in an important insight about the nature of experiential learning.
April 1 - Course Design and Development Ideas That Work
By: Mary Bart in Free Reports, Instructional Design
This 17-page report features proven course design alternatives implemented in courses of varying sizes and disciplines. It’s sure inspire you to rethink how you could change certain components of your courses to build a better learning environment.
March 17 - Six Principles of a Successful Course Redesign
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Instructional Design
Required introductory courses, especially those in math and science, offer special teaching challenges. Frequently, these are courses that must be completed before students can proceed to their chosen majors.
December 7 - Primed for Learning: Maximizing Teachable Moments When Students are Ready and Willing to Learn
By: Mary Bart in Teaching and Learning
Teachable moments, those special times when students are most ready and willing to learn, are traditionally considered unplanned opportunities. But should teachable moments be treated like unexpected gifts or can they actually be set in motion with a little advanced anticipation and planning by the instructor?
September 17 - What Should be Standardized?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning, Teaching Professor Blog
I was reading an article that describes the attempts of a marketing department to standardize the various sections of an introductory principles of marketing course. What caught my attention and has been following me around since I read it is this: “In all sections students must pass the exams for the course regardless of their grades on other assignments for the class. This keeps students from using group projects to raise their grades.” (p. 12)
September 15 - A Modular Course Design Benefits Online Instructor and Students
By: Rob Kelly in Online Education
Andrea Henne, dean of online and distributed learning in the San Diego Community College District, recommends creating online courses composed of modules—discrete, self-contained learning experiences—and uses a course development method that specifies what to include in each module.
