Week 1

What Makes a Great Course?








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“I wouldn’t have minded school if they taught you important things like how to have good sex and what brand of wine is the best… But for some reason they were hell bent on teaching me algebra” -- Ben Mitchell

Think back to courses that you’ve taken at BOLLI, or even back to courses you took in college. Which ones stand out? What made them special? I remember a course on Glaciers, which I signed up almost by accident but which turned out to be one of my favorite courses ever. The teacher took our small class through an intellectual journey of exploration and discovery of a world that we hadn’t known was there. Together we did projects, wrote papers and ended up with some mastery of a remote corner of academia, but one that became very relevant, as the issues I learned about climate change fifty years ago grew in importance until today.

One of the most important features of a course is the topic. A great topic will appeal to a lot of people; conversely if you decide to teach “Current Issues in Corporate Tax Accounting” you’ll draw far fewer students. Picking a topic is your first and perhaps most important job, so how do you do it? It’s not a task, it’s a process which you’ll be exploring and refining over the next four weeks or so. Use Passion, Imagination and Brainstorming to come up with some ideas. Discuss those ideas by bouncing them off peers and friends. Research the topic through books and the internet, and then refine and reorient, maybe dropping some ideas and adding others:

It’s important to be imaginative and fluid, and not get locked in to an idea. If you can keep your ideas percolating, you can often flesh out the course so it becomes much more robust than the original idea. And if the idea doesn’t grow, sometimes other topic ideas will present themselves and flourish.

Evaluating Topics

As you go through the process, how do you evaluate whether a topic idea is good or bad? Here are some guidelines to keep in mind:

      1. The topic should be complex with multiple ways to approach it, allowing for multiple points of view, leading to animated discussions. Ambiguity is your friend, black and white, right and wrong will be boring.

      2. You should be interested in the topic, perhaps even passionate. It’s very hard to teach something you’re not interested about. On the other hand, you may not want to teach something you’ve studied all your life. This is an experience where you can grow and develop a new inner talent, together with your class.

      3. The topic should be relevant to BOLLI’s age cohort. And there should be ways to link the topic to people’s lives today.

      4. Is the topic broad enough, or perhaps too broad to cover in 5 or 10 weeks? I once considered leading a study group on the History of the Jews, until I bounced the idea off some friends.

      5. Can you develop a narrative arc for the course? You will want each week to have a full and engaging discussion, but the following week you will need to move on to another aspect of the topic, hopefully building on what has been learned to date.

You don’t have to be an expert in the subject, or even know much about it. You will learn, exploring the topic as you research and design the course. Then you, as a guide, will take your class through the same journey of exploration that you just went through. As the guide for the course, you want your students to experience the same sense of discovery that you felt when researching your course. As a good friend of mine counselled me: “Never tell them the 'answer', give them the opportunity to discover things for themselves. You’ll often find that they discover things that you overlooked.”

Places to go for Ideas

At this point, you might despair of ever finding the perfect topic. Don’t despair; the topic doesn’t have to be perfect. As long as you find it fascinating, you’ll convey that enthusiasm to the class. Where to start? Here are the topic categories and the percentage of courses for BOLLI Fall 2020:

You might get some inspiration from perusing a list of 1500 free online courses from the world’s top universities, the Great Courses, Ted Talks, the Best Online Virtual Museums (or this online museum list), or edX.org.

Let your imagination run! Get excited! Bounce your course ideas off your peers. Brainstorm! When you have some ideas you like, you can start to look for course materials that you can hang onto a syllabus, which is the subject we’ll take up next week.

Preparation for our First Class

During our first class we’ll go around the Zoom screen, introducing each other and talking about potential course topics.

Please bring to class three course ideas that you are interested in; don’t worry, they don’t have to be polished, just some ideas that you’re thinking about. Sharing your ideas with other class members is a key way to get helpful ideas and feedback.

Over the next few sessions we’ll discuss your ideas and get feedback. We’ll continue this process for at least four sessions, so that you have plenty of time to refine your ideas before you settle in on your final course topic.

It can be a little intimidating to share your ideas with the class, but that’s the best way to learn. It’s exactly what you’ll be doing as study group leader, so it’s good practice. When you discuss someone’s idea, please be honest and respectful. Don’t tell them it’s a great idea if you don’t like it; but tell them why you don’t like it, not that it’s a terrible idea. And make suggestions that they can consider.

Remember, as in any study group, we’re all in this together, and if we’re honest, respectful, and speak from the heart, we will inspire each other to greatness.