Independent Study Example 1:
Course Design & Improvement

• Develop a working knowledge of Project Management

  • Independent review and application of project management fundamentals

• Complete the Cutting Edge Course Design Tutorial

  • Design an academic course in stages while working through each section of the Cutting Edge tutorial

Here's the official course description that we need to match: LDRV 498 - Senior Capstone 

"This course focuses on developing project management skills for graduating seniors in the Organizational Leadership BAS degree program and other students interested in project management. It supports a better understanding of project management concepts and methodology. Students will apply these concepts by developing a viable project plan for a non-profit organization or small business in the local community."

Saylor Academy: BUS402: Project Management

Free Ebook: Project Management from Simple to Complex

• HTML | PDF | DOCx

• The Flat World Knowledge version

PMP test prep 

Current Book: Schwalbe's Introduction to Project Management for Instructors

• Welcome to the instructor Web site for Kathy Schwalbe's book, An Introduction to Project Management. The fifth edition (ISBN 978-1505212099) was published in June 2015. 

• Public site available to all students, please go to www.intropm.com or www.pmtexts.com.

We will be planning our class and THEN putting parts online. Instructional design is tough (Dr. Perkl used to do it as her main job),  but it makes it easier to ensure your class is consistent, clear, and well-planned - which is VERY important. 

<< If you’ve never taught online before - this article is a great thing to read first - to get you in the mindset of best practices. >>

Typically this tutorial takes people 2-5 hours for each part (there are 3 parts total). This time investment depends mostly on how much material you come into the class with. You will get done faster if you do not try to multitask while completing it - it is especially a process of intense thought for Part I and II. Completing it will ensure you end up with a strategically planned course that effectively meets both program and your goals.

⇒ Start the Tutorial Here ⇐

For Part 1.1: Context and Constraints

Consider the constraints and context laid out above in our philosophies. Plan to reward practice and contribution in the beginning of the course and excellence at the end.

 For Part 1.2: Overarching Goals

Be sure your course is meeting the goals listed for the program and in the curriculum map for this course. (If we need to edit the Cover and Assess notes for a class we can, just let me know when you're done redesigning the class.)

Assessment Plan that we need to ensure we meet the goals of in the class: https://ucatt.arizona.edu/ 

For Part 1.3: Ancillary Skills Goals

Pick 1-2 ancillary skills you’d like them to focus on in the class and have them do multiple assignments with it throughout. (Example: 471 is written communication, 304 is teamwork as part of the sim participation, etc.). Only focusing on one ancillary skill is completely fine! You can also have them work on the same assignment, just different parts or on improving it week to week in different ways, throughout the entire semester.

• Peer Reviews/Learning to Give Feedback: This is such a valuable skill, if it can be integrated then it should be, but I know it’s difficult so only do it if you have a good plan and idea and it suits the material.

• A warning about group work:  I don’t think that the way teams work in classes is really the same as at work, students don’t seem to learn from it when they’re too busy being frustrated. Especially online this can be an issue. So I allow it but try not to require it, instead facilitating conversations so they can learn from each other without the possible frustration of a shared grade. Still, we should be emphasizing it - so if you want to do that then two ideas are to either formalize it carefully to reduce frustration or allow it to be a choice (let them form self-managed teams on their own, which you provide materials to help them be successful in but don't formally manage).

For Part 1.4: Content --> Goals

Don't worry about textbooks yet! Just keep working through the tutorial.

For Part 2.1: Course Plan

You don't need to be laying out the full week by week plan yet, but instead considering the content coverage and skills practice you want in the course.

For Part 2.2: Strategies & Assignments

Learning styles are a myth. Ignore that nonsense. The rest of this section is valid. What is good about providing multiple methods(like you would if you falsely believed in learning styles) is that providing choices to students can improve engagement and motivation, but it's not required except when needed to ensure course accessibility (which is covered in more detail later on this page).

This class is exempt from needing to follow a standard amount of work per week, since it's a capstone, so we don't have to worry so much about structure and flow and balancing workloads or types of assignments except in the preparatory skills part if we're doing that with them (i.e. teaching them the principles of Project Management).

• Some other assignment types and techniques you can consider beyond what they cover are...

  • anything humanizing for the course.

  • ... any information literacy related work (we are in the Information Age, so these are very relevant).

  • ... any of brilliant alternatives to term papers. No term or research papers should be assigned in our classes. Executive summaries are acceptable, just focus on doing something that is more suited to the expectations employers will have for our students or that will accomplish a major learning objective.

  • ... anything related to the real world basic thought skills leaders need, like general critical thinking, logic and reasoning, self-awareness, skepticism and the ability to distinguish opinion from fact (and why being a participating member in the age of denial will hurt their leadership abilities), etc. etc. 

  • ... or very specific things related to practicing life skills like how to improve their social skills, how to write better emails, how to listen, how to increase frustration tolerance, how to give feedback and criticism, how to manage from the middle or bottom, etc. etc.

• One assignment that can do a LOT of these things at once is to work with an Open Text or Open Readings and have a weekly assignment to be updating the text or criticizing it, etc. 

  • • This could be done via Google Docs even, which would teach them so many things at once (current collaboration and technical skills used in many corporations, how to be a conscious consumer, information literacy, critical thinking, etc. etc.), and it would do all of that while we could give back to the greater scholarly community by making our new and improved text available to others at the end of the semester.  

    • This is also the kind of project students can cite on a resume and mention in interviews, etc. (The library and bookstore are committed to helping enable these kinds of projects if we want to do them!)

For Part 2.3: Assessment

Remember what I said before, 'Plan to reward practice and contribution in the beginning of the course and excellence at the end.'  I LOVE the idea of cooperative exams in leadership courses, and I'm pressuring our students to let go of this silly idea of needing to work alone all the time, since business is now all about collaboration and constant communication (in a knowledge/info economy), facilitating them working together informally is in all of our best interests.

• Rubric: We use a Universal Rubric for grading ALL work in all classes (you are required to do the same).

• Extra Credit: We give Extra Credit for Organizational Citizenship Behaviors in all classes (so yours should do this).

If you want to look at another resource - try this page for a great overview of how to assess student learning.

For Part 2.4: The Syllabus

Picking a Textbook (and other materials like cases, sims, etc.)

As noted in our Initiatives - we're committed to our course materials costing no more than $100 for books and additional materials (standard items like laptops and a headset don't count toward that total).

For Part 3.1: Following Through

• Develop a plan of action: Supplement their worksheet with our course planning checklist.  Remember to refer regularly to the Semester Timeline & Checklist for the tasks you need to complete for the UA and for your course as well.

• Don't reinvent the wheel:

  • Review the appropriate Course Resource Page and the relevant materials available there. (If someone left course comments, this is the time to integrate and then delete them.) Make sure you get copies of whatever you need.

  • Course Crossovers:  Feel free to use the search bar on our other classes (or just right on that main UA Google Sites page! We may need to make sure everyone is sharing with everyone else though) and then to copy and paste anything in them that is teaching a concept you also want to cover! 

    • Example search of Jeannie's 304 for the term negotiation. (Permission required for access)

    • Example of a page with a crossover alert on it(Permission required for access)

    • All of the course sites we currently have should be listed on our LDRV Faculty site.

Great Free/Cheap Stuff

• Find free or UA licensed legitimately good resources.... (and don't forget to search the library or request materials through them)

• Bookmark this page of links to resources (like free images through the library) in case you need it later. Though for images, Getty is amazing.

  • FlatWorldKnowledge offers wonderfully cheap textbooks and let's students choose to pay to print them or not.

  • For ANY Writing Assignments, refer to the Writing Commons: It's this amazing open source text for writing, curated and constantly updated by writing profs from around the world. I found perfect readings to assign for every type of writing I have ever asked my students to do. http://writingcommons.org/

  • Integrate supplemental open readings or use open texts: Enter this exact line into Google's search bar, adding whatever term you're looking for - https://saylordotorg.github.io: YOURTERM

    • http://www.saylor.org/2015/03/blog-saylor-academy-hosted-textbooks-now-in-html-and-editable-by-anybody/

• Sims & Cases we like: Interpretive Simulations which come in at $29.95 per student (we're using HRManagement in LDRV 304 and Entrepreneur in LDRV 404 currently). MIT offers some great free things too.

• Consider using a tool like CATME for Teamwork.  

  • CATME is a suite of tools focused on helping prepare students to function effectively in teams that also supports faculty as you manage your students' team experiences. The tools are based on rigorous scholarly work and are updated when new findings emerge - saving you the effort of needing to research and stay up to date on best practices in this area, CATME Tool Summary. You don't have to use every tool, but if you will be using teams I strongly recommend you work these tools and exercises built around them into your course.  Award credit for completing the things you want them to learn, etc. 

    • First, you'll need to request a faculty account using your UA email at this link - then you'll be ready to go very shortly! 

    • After that, you'll have a way to add your students and view and manager their interactions and work as much or as little as you want to. 

    • Here are links to two articles reviewing use of this tool in courses just in case they help you see how to use it yourself: 

      • Kelly, R. (Ed.). (2013). Assessing Team Members. The Teaching Professor, 27(4). Retrieved from http://info.catme.org/wp-content/uploads/Teaching-Professor-April-3013.pdf Hrivnak, G. A. (2013). 

      • CATME Smarter Teamwork. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 12(4), 679–681. doi:10.5465/amle.2013.0302

Planning your Course (Prepping the Course Outline)

You will likely have a course Google Site you can copy from the previous instructor which should include a syllabus for you to customize. If you don't, take a look at this example (though it is from summer), and keep the following in mind:

• Some course content is required, be sure to integrate that into your plan.

• You must organize your class by the weeks shown in our calendar (not modules or units, though you can put TOPICS within the Weeks if you like). We must all use the same dates for Week 1, 2, etc.  The main thing students struggle with when in online and hybrid courses is keeping on track, this helps a lot. (Here's an example of a course outline which does this well.)

  • However, don't force yourself to think about spacing the assignments week by week if that doesn't fit you and your class best - discussions could be allowed to span 3 weeks before you have a live session or something if that suits you and your class. Students love when assignments span 2 weeks, especially for team or group work.

• Our Fall and Spring semesters are 16 weeks, but we try to self pace the first 3 weeks until we pass the add/drop date and the last week is Finals, so you have between 12 - 14 weeks to deliver content to the students and 15 weeks for real assignments. You can start the actual date planning by using our calendar (pay special attention to the schedule google document linked there).

• More details on scheduling are below.