Singleton Course Design Institute
Have you ever asked:
- What are students learning and remembering from a course? 2 weeks out, 6 months, 1 year?
- With so much technology and content on-line, what does a faculty member really add to the course that enhances learning?
- How do you prioritize all the content?
The Singleton Course Design Institute is an interdisciplinary community of faculty that meet for three mornings to consider their whole course by beginning with the end in mind. By identifying the faculty member's desired outcomes for the course, unstated goals tend to rise to the surface. These unstated goals are often tied to the faculty member's beliefs and dream for their students. Creating courses that center on a longer term goal, engages the whole student and thereby creates learning that lasts where learning objectives, assessments and assignments results in a more cohesive course. The community setting reduces the pressure that what you are currently doing is wrong, it is not. This institute offers new faculty as well as seasoned faculty the time, space and tools to think more deeply about a course. The Union Course Design Institute has the added bonus of featuring numerous faculty stories of course design: how they went about it and what they learned.
Beginning in May 2014, we have observed that designing or redesigning a course not only engages the student, but it is energizing for the faculty member because it clarifies what they are after in their course and ways of prioritizing their content based on their course goal.
"Teaching is a basic human practice whose excellence depends upon the exercise of certain intellectual, moral and spiritual virtues... Teaching is closer to an art than it is to techne, and though it certainly involves mysterious transaction, it is nevertheless a public activity that is improvable through practice and criticism... calling for constant application of practical wisdom."
— Mark Schwehn; The Spirit of Teaching