Work talk

 I have spent the last 3 days attending a course design workshop where a bunch of faculty and staff from across campus came together with instructional design experts and various campus resource reps to build new courses. We learned a ton about designing transparent and equitable assignments, aligning our course to program learning outcomes, developing multiple kinds of assessments, creating participatory environments, etc.

 If you are an educator, all of these things might seem like second nature to you, but I work at a research institution where most people in the classroom with students are subject matter experts, not trained teachers. For us, this stuff is cutting edge.

I LOVE programs like this and have done a couple other ones over the years (usually when I need to create a new course or redesign one I have inherited), so I had heard of these ideas before, but it was fascinating to imagine how I could apply design principles to a brand new class I am developing. It is always fun to hear how other people in other disciplines think about their students and their course design, and I met lots of news, brilliant people from so many different departments.

My favorite part about the institute, though, was how much it shored up my life choices and reminded me that I am doing work I really love. First, it showed me what I DO NOT WANT, namely to work in an office space all the time all day long. Even though this office space was a gorgeous conference center with SO MANY SNACKS and also views of the lake. (Seriously— we had breakfast and a buffet lunch and then the room next door to us was FULL of snacks, everything from fresh fruit and veggies to chafing dishes with chicken drumsticks, egg rolls, and meatballs. There were cookies, brownies, all manner of granola bars and salty snacks, hard boiled eggs, cheese, yogurt, coffee, tea, soda, water, sparkling water, a freezer full of ice cream treats, etc. AND the snacks changed throughout the day every day. SO PERFECT. Like, no wonder we all had so much fun and worked so hard). 

The course design workshop also reminded me what I love about my job— a huge, dedicated community of practice, teaching undergraduates, teaching classes about subjects I could study forever, making connections with people who have completely different disciplinary homes that I do. It is always so rewarding and refreshing to find pockets of people on this research-focused campus who are as passionate about undergraduate education as I am.

The last hour of the last day was a presentation situation where we all got 2 minutes to explain our course, talk about a big takeaway from the week, and outline the work we still have to do, and I loved hearing what everyone was working on. My table had an ed policy person teaching grad students, a mass comm person teaching magazine writing for grads and undergrads, a human ecology person working on a capstone course where seniors compile a portfolio of their work, and me, developing a rhetoric of reproductive justice course for communication arts majors. We had already talked to each other a lot about our courses, but we didn’t know as much about the other projects in the room. We all spent time making course posters to hang up around the room, and then we went in poster order talking about our classes. SO MANY CLASSES! Service learning, music education, business theory, bio mechanical engineering, Slavic pop culture, large and small animal anatomy, genetic counseling, international relations, etc. We had people designing grad classes, professional masters program classes, undergrad seminars, large undergrad classes, upper level, intro level— all of it!  My class is asynchronous online (even though I hope to teach it in person or in a hybrid mode as well— if you want to ever teach a class online or in a flexible modality, you need to propose it as a fully online courses but then you can change the modality later. If you have a course that’s been approved to be F2F, it is harder to get online approval), but most were in-person. 

One huge thing I am changing about my teaching is in the area of transparency. I am going to have a stated weekly learning objective that relates back to the course learning outcomes that’s really visible in each module, and I am going out of my way to state the purpose of each assignment as well as really clear criteria for success. I will be doing TONS of grading because the course is probably not going to be large enough for a TA or a grader its first time out, so I think streamlining expectations will really help me when I provide feedback, something I am pretty rusty at since I usually have grad students teaching with me. The learning objective/outcome thing is not a must in my area because it’s not something our accrediting body asks for . . . YET, but why not incorporate it now when I have all the time in the world (well, until January 2024) to make it work, you know?

I still need to scan a bunch of primary texts (and some scholarly articles) and put them in my course shell on Canvas. I also need to record 10 weeks of lecture content, meaning I have to write and design 10 lectures first, and I am going to record some short videos where I talk through all of the major course assignments and explain them, etc. I also need to write exam questions for the class’s 4 short exams— but this also means I need to immerse myself in the course reading first, so I will work on this a little bit at a time. But! I have built the course on Canvas, designed all of the assignments and rubrics, and got a TON of content creation done in just 3 days. (And I reached out to a designer to help me with the media production and have studio dates on the books for early September, meaning I need to write lectures between now and then).

So, spring 2024 course boot camp was a raging success, and now? IT’S SUMMER!