The Challenge of Course Design
All learning designers are essentially futurists.
This is because the student who embarks on your designed course will not develop the skills and attributes you anticipated until they have completed it. If your course is part of a multi-year degree, you need to be thinking about a future that might be three or four years ahead.
This might seem like common sense, and to some extent it is, but we often do not start the design process with the kind of collective reflection that ensures we are the right people to design this course or programme. Whether we have the foresight and skills to anticipate what the future holds.
It is self-evident that if you have designed your course around practical activities using a piece of software, and you know that this version will inevitably be replaced several times in the next three years, you are likely to teach just the core and enduring functionalities of the software.
If you are teaching some aspect of urban planning, should you anticipate the impact of self-driving vehicles? When teaching a politics course on the Middle East, how well-grounded are your assumptions about the immovable nature of borders?
Some of you might be saying, “But Simon, I teach history, or foundation level biology or mathematics.’ You may have a point, but I stress ‘may’. Perspectives on history change as new evidence is revealed, biology advances every day as technology provides new insights, and ‘new’ maths underpins much of the current Artificial Intelligence movement.
It is easier to teach about what is than about what might be. We owe it to our students to try. Please reflect on how much your discipline has changed in the last five or ten years.
Orienting your Design Team
It is important to establish the scope of any course or programme design. The canvas upon which it is being painted. The extent to which you have to spend time doing this will depend on your own experience of yourself and your design team members, and the consistency with which your institution plans and designs its courses. You may also benefit from an institution that has an experienced educational development unit that will assist you in your course designs. However, you should feel free to challenge their assumptions too!
In stages 2 and 3 of the 8-SLDF (future posts), explore the broader context in which your course is being designed to ensure optimal alignment with students’ expectations and institutional capabilities. For now, we aim simply to ensure that we are setting off on the journey to design within our institutional limits.
There are several foundational questions your team needs to answer before you can begin. These include:
- What is the credit value of this course? Most countries have nationally determined credit weightings for tertiary qualifications, such as 20 credits equalling 200 hours of student learning.
- Will your course fit into an existing programme that will otherwise be unchanged?
- If you are designing a new programme, what existing courses and pathways are anticipated?
- Will your offering be an option or a compulsory course?
- Will it have co-requisites, pre-requisites or post-requisites?
- What are the timetabling restraints? Is there a formal pattern for learning delivery? It could be that the institutional expectation is for courses to be delivered through a 60-minute lecture and a 120-minute seminar each week.
- Will it be available for out-of-programme enrolment? Some University courses are available for the public on a course-by-course basis.
Design Team Activity 1: Future Learning
Before you even choose the actual design team, I suggest you bring together a group of your colleagues who teach within the same discipline or programme as the one your course is being designed for.
This could be as few as two others, or as many as you can fit into the room you are using. For this exercise, there is little danger of ‘too many cooks spoiling the broth’, and having divergent opinions is a good thing, although, from experience, I would suggest 15 as an upper limit. You may identify a contributor that you ‘must’ have on board, and perhaps others you would rather not!
Allow 60 minutes for this activity. You will need time later to reflect on what has been said. Doing this exercise online via conferencing software may automatically generate a transcript, which can be useful.
Ask two simple questions:
What has changed in our discipline in the last five to ten years?
and
What impact do we think Artificial Intelligence will have on our discipline?
Asking the first question as a historical one will inevitably lead to the present and the future… trust me! You don’t need to curate the responses too much; some participants will want to look back, others will be more focused on the horizon.
You may need to prompt colleagues by citing recent scholarly research. Still, it is more important to focus the conversation on societal changes resulting from recent developments in your discipline.