THINGS I LEARNED FROM USD CTL COURSE DESIGN WORKSHOP

Aug 02, 2019 teaching USD grant CTL

Eversy summer, CTL at USD provides a fellowship for faculty members to sit together in a week long workshop to learn from each other or a resource how to design a new course or redesign an old course. Here is a list of things that I learned from it.

Learning how to learn

• study plans made by students
  • signed by students and instructor as contracts
  • include both students’ and instructor’s expectation
  • leave flexibilities to modify
  • give a test period
  • ways to avoid burn-out
  • personal strength and weakness or characters
  • things to learn and to test
  • ways to assess
• practice
  • identify things that students don’t understand

Caring

Instructor cares about students, students care about each other, both care about the subject under study.

• motivation speach
  • their role in the world, value their role
  • course facilitate self growth
• real world examples, case studies
  • it triggers emotion
• instructor and students share personal feelings
  • it comforts others
• discussion, group project
  • students need to understand that their goal is to grow themselves instead of showing the “best” of themselves to others
  • let students to form groups by themselves so that they feel comfortable to work with their teammates

Assessment

• frequent quiz, homework and exams with immediate feedback
• IF-AT
• Rubrics need to be included in assignment description
• template or other guidance for assignment
• different types and levels of assignment and grading
  • grade not only result, but also effort (break big project into small tasks that can be graded)
• grade harder at the beginning to create a steady improvement to encourage students
• or grade harder toward the end since students should have learned over the course
• give students information about her progress more frequently
• grade is a quantitative feedback
• stress test in a review class (a simulated test)
• pre-test to gause the progress
• Tell students that failing in a class is a low stake failure compared to a real life failure

Others

• feedback from students
  • after class survey to get instant feedback
  • muddiest point (ask students what they don’t understand)
  • fun questions (color of the instructor’s glasses)
  • tell students usage of the data collected
• syllabus
  • office hour policy (students must schedule meetings with instructor to do something together)
  • syllabus quiz to check if students read it
  • easter egg hidden in syllabus
• Boyer’s model

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