Time Savers: course design
Building in time savers
When you are designing courses, it pays to think ahead and consider scheduling, peak weeks and workload consequences, for both teachers and students. Below, are some tips and tricks that may be helpful to have at hand when your course is still in its infancy. (Note, however, that other categories of time savers may also contain ideas that may be useful in the course-design stage.)
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Relating Learning objectives
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Scheduling in context
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Guest lectures and consultation weeks
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New and old
Relating learning objectives
… to each other
Once you have formulated you learning objectives (see more about this, here) , you can begin to cluster them in a variety of ways. Some will naturally go together. Others may follow from one another. Some are wholly unrelated. Knowing how learning objectives fit within the natural build-up of a course, allows you to combine them within planned activities or build on earlier activities in the course. For tutorials, try to centre classroom activities round more than one learning objective.
… to types of assignment
If you want to assess various learning objectives, see if you can come up with assignments suitable for assessing multiple learning objectives. This will be more efficient both from a design as well as from a correction-work standpoint. It has the added benefit of making your students more aware of how the formulated learning objectives fit together.
Scheduling in context
Holidays and conferences
When planning submission dates and correction work, it can be useful to have a good look at the calendar for important dates such as holidays, and conferences, and take these into account. These are easily forgotten, and may vary from year to year, potentially wreaking havoc with the planning of a course you think you know well.
Peak weeks and other courses
Similarly, the academic year implies that courses and exams run parallel to one another, and therefore have similar weeks in which workload peaks. Although there is often not much we can do about this, the careful planning of assignments can sometimes just take the edge off some of this workload. For instance, cumulative assignments, such as portfolios that are regularly checked, or assignments for which a draft has already been submitted before are usually less time-consuming than wholly new work. Also consider that experimental assignments that you are trying out for the first time may be less suitable for peak moments.
Administrative deadlines
Administrative deadlines, such as those related to Binding Study Advice for instance, can mean that certain groups of students need to be prioritised over other groups. If your workload dictates that such priorising cannot be avoided, it helps to be aware of these deadlines. In addition, you can let others (administration, line managers, etc.) know well in advance, if you suspect you will not be able to make these deadlines, so that alternative measures can be taken.
Guest lectures and consultation weeks
Guest lectures
Guest lectures can be a good way to give yourself a breather during a course, and to give the students a different perspective on the course content. If it is possible to schedule a guest lecture in a week that is otherwise quite hectic, then do so. This can save you a lot of preparation time. (However, for reasons of common courtesy as well as to ensure everything runs smoothly, you will need to be present for the lecture itself.)
Consultation weeks related to student work
Especially in later years, students will be doing more complex work for which individual or small-group help and feedback is useful. When you set appointments with individual students or small groups, make these optional whenever possible, and ask students to sign up for them. If you set time slots early in the morning, this will often discourage students who do not really need to see you.
New and old
Update older materials
The more courses you have taught, the more material from previous or obsolete courses you will have. This is not only true for you, but also for your colleagues. Demand for course topics can be cyclical. It is both a shame and unnecessary to throw out all that work that people have put their hearts and souls into. With a bit of updating, they can be made fresh and relevant again for a new cohort of students.
Combine old and new
Note that what is new for students can still be very familiar territory for you. However, adding up-to-date insights, and information that is also new for you as an educator can certainly add spice and variety to your teaching. It is tempting, when designing a course, to get carried away by all of these new insights. You may get so excited that you plan on introducing your students to as much of it as possible. Do not lose sight of the additional work this may involve, in terms of designing assignments, rubrics, PowerPoint slides, exam questions, further-reading lists, etc.
Make an informed choice of adding something new that has you truly excited, but embed this in the body of knowledge that you know well. Some of this knowledge may build on what students have already learned elsewhere, and some of it will be wholly new to them, anyway. By staying at least partly on familiar ground, finding the time to give due attention to what is new to you will be easier.
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