Course Development Made Clear
Course Summary
Backwards design is a concept that Chris Hakala, the creator of this course, focuses on heavily for proper course development. No matter the modality of the class, he explains in this course how to check course content for effectiveness and asses if backwards design can help to make the course better. Backwards design involves working from what is to be assessed back to what activity, assignment or task can be used to create a proper way to asses that knowledge or skill.
Why Did I Choose This Course?
My course search was a bit of a double-edged sword. There were so many things I wanted to learn about, but I also knew that I had a more immediate need for some topics.Through a set of unplanned circumstances, I ended up having to teach a different course before the one that was originally scheduled to begin at the 5-week mark and run for 12 weeks. Instead, I had to pick up a course that was having issues with servers as well as problems with the students to be able to create their coursework. While trying to navigate that, it became apparent that after this semester, the course would need to be updated to work with a more current .NET version to remove it from the server having issues. I knew that I was going to be one of the parties responsible for that update and upgrade, and I wanted to find some OneHE courses that could assist with that. I had already chosen the “Creating Universally Designed Assessments” as a course, and I had hoped that this course would give me a good starting point to rebuild the new course I was given.
Personal Reflections
The welcome portion of the course brought up some good points that teachers might be experts (or at the very least quite knowledgeable) in their disciplines, but they aren't necessarily experts in relating that material to students in a way they will learn it properly. I had a teacher in high school that was like that. He was a brilliant man, but when he was going over some calculus problems, he'd get the wrong answer after describing the whole process to us. Then, he would quickly fix it to the right answer. We were lost, not knowing the true process to get that answer because our notes and steps were calculated with the wrong result. So, I found that information from the course relatable.As I continued with the course it became apparent that good course creation involves a marriage of alignment between assignments, learning objectives and assessments. A class needs to be graded, and a college has certain learning objectives for each course. So, how do we blend each of the three things into a cohesive class that promotes learning for several types of students and learning styles. It is also important, especially for an introductory class, that they can maintain that knowledge not just in the twelve weeks that the course runs but beyond that. If students aren't able to grasp the concepts and objectives they need from the introduction class, how will they properly continue with their web programming degree plan or into the job market? That makes it even more important, in my mind, that I find a way to design each course in the best way to bring the knowledge to my students in a way that works for them.
One of the tasks that is generally difficult for me to find the right workaround for is how to keep the student's attention on topic and learning but still be able to convey the massive amounts of knowledge needed for them to succeed in the class. It was talked about in this course, but sometimes the practicality of it doesn't seem to fit into the mold of time available. Plus, each class is different. There is no way to know if there are more visual learners versus memorizers or on hand practice learners versus auditory learners. I'll go into more reflections on that when I talk about the “Active Learning” course that I also took from OneHE.
I was happy to find out that some of the methods we currently use (which I found out is called interleaving) were also recommended in this course.
New Approaches
I would like to think that I have a closer connection between the student learning process and the faculty teaching process because I am not as far removed from taking the same courses they are right now. Although I've been creating websites since the late 90's, I came back to formally get my web programming degree starting in 2020. Also, as a tutor for these classes for the last several years, I have seen how different types of explanations and practical activities have helped those students to grasp the concepts they couldn't with online video and articles.I think that the best way to reach the most people is to have a mixture of the various learning methods available to them. That means a bit more work on my part to have different topics set up into different coding experiences, but I think the result will be worth it. It also goes along with the project that my department head and I will be working on to create a forum for each web class that all web programming faculty can put resources into. Topics would be presented in different ways: video, audio, reading, practical application, etc.
So, I would like to continue in that vein and implement more little exercises or practical activities for debugging in the one class. I think that when you can track down a problem in the code, it helps you to understand the code better as well. You must keep in mind what a code does, where it would go, and what it looks like in those places. Also building up code knowledge with smaller sections will help to make what is really going on in the code clearer. Those mini exercises could then be instructed on how to be put into what used to be the big assignment before adding the finishing coding touches to it to make it a complete larger assessment. By repeating the information in multiple mini tasks, it will hopefully help the students to retain the full assignment better.
It is vital that rubrics are created for the Search Engine Optimization (SEO, ITWP 1450) and ASP.Net (ITWP 2300) classes to give the students a clear understanding of what they need to do to succeed. The rubrics also give extra instructions, directions, or examples to help guide the student to know what the important aspects of each assignment are.
The on-ground classes I teach would probably benefit from different retrieval practice items within the class time. Maybe have a coding activity to bring up the concepts. Then, perhaps a little mini quiz to reinforce the memory recall on the topics on a different day. It might be a good idea to bring concepts from a couple weeks prior into the current week with activities and quizzes like this to keep the information fresher in their mind.
My Predictions
For the introduction class, I predict that days when it would be a “lecture day”, the students will find them less monotonous. With the addition of practical exercises after several slides, it will hopefully cement the idea in their brains more securely. I am hoping that it makes the topics more fun to learn.For the SEO and ASP classes, I think that the detailed rubrics will produce less questions on what is needed for each assignment and clearer direction on their purpose. It will make the assignments more relatable to the individual course objectives through the use of detailed rubrics as well.