Planning And Teaching An Undergraduate Course

Planning a course involves many issues including choosing the objectives, scope and content, preparing a syllabus, developing lectures, laboratories, projects and assignments, and evaluation of students. Teaching the course is the implementation of the plan while developing a rapport with the students and monitoring classroom dynamics. Teaching requires adapting your plan to your current group of students and to the changing educational environment. This paper will discuss many aspects of planning and teaching an undergraduate course including a discussion on creating a student-centered environment through active and cooperative learning, and the use of rubrics and concept inventories. The emphasis will be on making incremental modifications to courses and assessing the impact of the changes. Introduction So you have been given the task of teaching a course.... Whether you are designing a new course, or teaching an existing course, there are many strategies to consider. You will find that prior to meeting your students, you will have many decisions to make and things to do. However, if your goal is to create a learning environment in which your students are expected to be active participants, you need to include some flexibility in your planning. The profile of your students may be different from your expectations or previous experiences; your plan will need to be adapted. Research on engineering education is continually changing; you may want to take advantage of some of the new work. This paper is divided into three sections: the first one will cover some of the details of planning a course, the second section will discuss teaching the course, and the third will suggest some next steps. Planning a Course Prior to making any decisions about your course, you will need to know your students’ backgrounds. What are the prerequisites for the course? This can include college-level prerequisites and pre-college courses required of all students in the program. Does your program usually have only high-achievers or a mixture of abilities? These questions will determine the content and the level to which you teach. The first step in planning a course is to determine the objectives and content. 1. Course Objectives and Content: The decision on course objectives and content generally depends on where this course lies in the curriculum. Courses that are prerequisites for higherlevel courses may have an existing syllabus, which details the objectives and content. It is important to determine how much latitude will be available in changing the course content. Significant modifications to such courses may require consultation with other faculty who rely on certain topics being covered in that course. However, if you are to teach a new course or an elective you may be able to determine up to 100% of the course content. P ge 10003.1 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” Course objectives can be used to determine course content. The objectives can be initially stated in general terms and then developed into more specific objectives. A well-defined list of course objectives should include the content to be covered and the abilities students are expected to demonstrate at the end of the course. This list should facilitate deciding what topics to cover and the scope of the coverage. The objectives for the courses may be stated in terms of correlation with Accreditation Board for Engineering Education (ABET) Criterion 3 (program goals and outcomes) to meet accreditation criteria [ABET, 2005]. Although the course objectives allow you to determine course content and areas of emphasis for tests, they can also be provided to students to indicate your expectations of them. The student’s ability to meet the stated objectives can be used in evaluating your teaching ability. One of the ways to develop course objectives is to use Bloom’s taxonomy, which divides the cognitive domain into six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation [Bloom, 1956]. This taxonomy can be used to determine that students are tested at different levels and are encouraged to develop higher lever skills such as synthesis and evaluation. For example, a student may be expected to a. define Ohm’s law b. explain Ohm’s law c. apply Ohm’s law to different resistors in a circuit d. analyze a circuit using Ohm’s law e. design a circuit for a specific purpose using Ohm’s law f. assess the accuracy of a previously analyzed circuit Each of these tasks requires the students to function at different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. McBeath Action verbs are a list of related verbs to each Bloom’s level, and can be used in the development of course objectives [McBeath, 1992]. The criteria used to determine course content can include students’ background, current trends in the field, course objectives, preparation for graduate school, number of design credits for ABET requirements, and available university resources. Regardless of how the course content is determined, it is important to decide what content to emphasize and how many class periods to spend on each topic. Deciding on content distribution will be important for the next step – selecting a format for your course. 2. Course Format: Now that you know what topics you want to teach, how will you deliver the material to the students? Lecture, laboratory, studio, field tours, or a combination? Will you and the students be in the same physical location or is there distance learning? Regardless of your delivery format, it is best to anticipate that students will have different learning styles and you may need to present your material in different formats. For example, you may need to put a topic in the context of the discipline to accommodate the global learners in your course. Your lecture may need to incorporate both visuals and text to be effective for visual and auditory learners alike. The format that you select or has been assigned to your course should optimize student engagement. Remember falling asleep in long lecture courses? Remember skipping classes because you could learn it all from the textbook? How do you make yourself an important P ge 10003.2 “Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education” part of assisting students with learning the material? Is there a way to provide students with immediate feedback on errors? Can you keep them coming? One of the ways that has been shown to achieve this engagement is to create an active learning environment in your course. Students tend to remember most of the material presented at the beginning of a lecture but forget most of the material at the end. When the material is presented in segments, students tend to retain more information. Students should be expected to actively participate in the learning process through the use of in-class activities. This can include brainstorming with a neighbor, handing in a list of the points that need to be clarified for the next class period, or solving a semester-long problem. In addition, you may provide assignments that encourage group work. While all this activity may seem to take away from the time spent on the course material, active and cooperative learning have been shown to improve students’ performance and retention. [Felder, 1995; Felder, 1998; Prince, 2004] 3. Course Textbook: The next step will be to select whether or not to have a mandatory course textbook. In firstand second-year courses, I strongly suggest having a course textbook or a photocopied packet of material and handouts, unless it is a design course. For these lower division courses, you will be teaching the fundamentals of the discipline and students may retain a good textbook for many years. For upper division courses, the decision on whether to use a textbook may depend on your approach in teaching the course. Once a decision has been made to select a textbook, it is now time to find the best match. Many factors may determine the textbook you choose including covering course content with the same emphasis in your planning, format of the course, the look of the textbook (font, color, layout, use of figures), resources for students (homework exercises, online tutorials), resources for faculty (solution manual, PowerPoint lecture slides), price, and acceptability. If many of your students transfer to other institutions, it may be worth considering a textbook utilized by many faculty in your discipline. A textbook is essential if at least 60% of your material and assignments are available in one source. Once a textbook has been selected, use it as much as possible. Students tend to dislike purchasing a required textbook only to have it lying unused. Some of the textbook publishers offer the option of creating a custom book for your course, which includes sections from several stand-alone textbooks. 4. Course Syllabus: Once you have decided on what topics to cover, the delivery format of your course and the textbook, you are almost ready to create your syllabus. Your syllabus sets the tone for your course and provides students information on instructors, the course and your expectations of them. Also include information on course management software that will be used. • Instructors: Important information about yourself and teaching assistants include name, phone number, office location, and office hours. • Course: Include the course name and number, course description, objectives, meeting times, textbook(s), reference material, grading policy and course content. I like to provide my students with a tentative weekly listing of the topics, the assigned reading, homework, and dates for assessments. To generate this information, I sit down with a monthly calendar and list the topics and sections to cove