Week 2
Designing Your Course
© Abhi Sharma, Creative Commons
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
What does it mean to design a course? At its most simplistic, you’re figuring out how to spend time. If a 10 week course will have 2 hours of weekly preparation, you’ve got 20 hours of preparation and 15 hours of class time to organize. What will you do with all that time? Obviously, you have to break the problem down into smaller bits. Here are some ways to approach course design:
Course Goals
Academics do this for a living and have some well thought out approaches. The most common is to define your course goals and then work backwards. This means determining first what you want your students to learn, be they facts, skills or theories. Working backwards helps you figure out how to structure the ordering of the course in order to get from here to there. This approach is often called Understanding by Design. Washington University’s Center for Teaching and Learning has a more in depth guide to course and syllabus design.
Here is a link to a short video of Avi Bernstein talking about Essential Questions for Course Design. And here is another video of Avi talking about the difference between an SGL as subject matter expert versus group leader.
Narrative Arc
The course goals idea is borrowed from academia. You can also think of your course as entertainment, and borrow the idea of a narrative arc from movies or storytelling. The narrative arc is the sequence of topics in your classes. There should be a beginning (introductions), a middle and and end. I like to think of the narrative arc as a ten day hike in the mountains. Each class takes you through different terrain to a different place, but they’re all connected, so that as you climb through the mountains you can look back to see where you’ve been and look ahead to see where your going. Using this analogy, each class builds on what you’ve learned and done together in previous classes, and hopefully by the end, when you reach the summit, there will be a synthesis where you can look back and see how all the pieces fit together.
Primary Source Approach
In the primary source approach, you pick a primary source, such a book, play, movie or series of movies, or series of short stories. In this approach, the organization of the course is determined by whatever book or primary source you use. This may be the only way to organize a literature course; the author of the work has done the organization for you and you and the class spend time deciphering what the author may have meant. This doesn’t mean that the primary source is the only material you’ll use; you will want to supplement a literature book with articles or even movies about the author, the context in which it was written etc. For non-fiction works, while the primary source approach has the benefit of the author having done a lot of the organizational work for you, it has the drawback of presenting only the author’s point of view. In order to imbue your classes with discussion, and even controversy, you may have to add other contrasting points of view to the readings.
Open Source Approach
In an open source course design, you go out and collect a wide variety of readings, web sites, academic papers, and videos and you stitch the most fascinating things into a collection which you then take your students through. You can read books on the topic and borrow some of their organizing principles. You can also organize your collection on your own web site, which has your own summaries and links to external resources and pdfs. This approach has the benefit of most flexibility and the ability to combine a wide variety of amazing things that you may have found, but it obviously will take longer to research and put together than the primary source approach.
Syllabus Design
When you submit your course proposal to the Curriculum Committee, they will want to see a syllabus, which is a short summary of what topics you will be covering from week to week. We’ll be talking more about syllabus design later in the course, but for now you can think about how your course might be organized. Chronological organization may make the most sense for a history course, but you can also organize your course by topics, points of view, concepts, or as a survey course. The topics that you cover each week could be independent from each other, or each week could look at the same event from a different point of view. You can even trace several different themes throughout the course, building in sophistication and complexity. Think of syllabus design as your building of an idea museum, with different displays in each weekly room that you visit, with your students growing in awe and wonderment as you journey through together.
Classroom Styles
What will your classroom sessions be like? Of course, you can and should vary them up, but here are some different styles to think about.
Lecture
We all know what this is. The instructor (it’s hard to call them a study group leader) does most of the talking, usually with slides, or even worse, without. The problem with lectures is that there’s limited engagement of the students, and if students are not engaged, they tend to drift off, check their email or do some online shopping. That is not to say that lectures are forbidden, they may be appropriate for esoteric or arcane subjects in which the lecturer knows a great deal more than the students. However, in order not to lose the students, the lecturer must stop frequently, take down the Zoom slide share so everyone can see each other, and engage the students with at least questions and answers and maybe a full blown discussion.
Facilitated Discussion
This is a hybrid model where the SGL will tee up a topic that was covered in the reading or study group questions by presenting some slides, images, or short (less than 5 minute) video. This is a nice way for the presentation to focus everyone on an issue from which they can then launch the discussion. In this approach the SGL may talk for 30% to 50% of class time, but everyone can remain engaged.
Pure Discussion
In this model, the class does most of the talking, with the SGL coming in to reorient the discussion, make some short responses, or act as moderator. Especially skilled SGLs can learn to step back and let the class drive the discussion; this is known as the Harkness method and we’ll be discussing it in more detail in Session 3.
Structured Classroom exercises
There are a variety of other things you can do in class. Debates are always fun, as students tend to get very engaged. Air and Share exercises involve breaking the class up into smaller groups (done with Zoom rooms), giving them time to discuss an issue, and then coming back together as a class and having each group report their findings. Having students volunteer to prepare reports is another excellent method of engagement, although participation should be voluntary as some students will refuse. Having guest speakers is another thing you can add to the class, and this is especially easy using Zoom.
Designing Courses for Varied Levels of Student Expertise
This can be a challenge, especially in literature and technical courses. I was in a physics course where the class included many students who had been graduate level physics and engineering students, mixed in with ordinary laypeople. In a situation such as that there is a risk that the laypeople will become passive observers watching the SGL interact with the experts. In that case it can be important to find ways to engage the laypeople, who may not want to look stupid, by tying the materials to everyday human experience and soliciting their reactions. The homework can also have several tracks, with more detailed materials for the experts in an appendix or accessible by optional links to other sources.
Sources for Courses
How do we find engaging content that will grab our Study Group Members’ attention, either in class or as supplemental readings? For classes that use a primary source, you can start by looking for an anchor book or two for your course. Search Amazon.com by typing your proposed topic in the Books search bar. Look for an average 4 to 5 star review; most books with three stars or less are either very controversial or terrible. Read the reviews and look under Product Details for the number of pages and the publication date. Once you find some books that look interesting, go to Books.Google.com and type the name and author of the book into the search bar. You’ll often be able to look at the table of contents and read the introduction and some or all of the chapters. This will give you a sense of whether the material is too dry or too technical. Another way to find or evaluate books is to search at the New York Review of Books, or the New York Times Book Review. Once you find some good candidate books, you can get them out of the Brandeis library or your local library, or order them through Amazon or Abebooks.com. Abebooks has used books that are usually much cheaper than those on Amazon and are often delivered within a week or so. For books and material out of copyright, Gutenberg.org and archive.org are great resources. BOLLI’s policy is that the maximum cost of materials for each class member per course is $45.
For internet articles, just do Google searches and page through the results, refining your searches as you go. You can scan the first page of search results, but then jump to page 3 or 4. You often note something on a later page that makes you want to modify your search because you’ll get a result you didn’t expect but that interests you. Another piece of this is learning how to narrow web search results by including a date in the original search. Artificial Intelligence 2018 gets you a different set of material than Artificial Intelligence 2030. Same thing with climate control, population growth, etc.
To get scholarly or journal articles, search at Scholar.Google.com, JStor.org, Researchgate, or Academia.edu. Many of the results from Scholar.Google.com will give you abstracts of journal articles and invite you to pay for the full article. If you want the full text, click the blue link to the right of the article and sometimes you’ll get a full text pdf or html copy for free. Sometimes you can google the exact article name and find that someone has posted the pdf somewhere for free. If you’re logged in to Google Scholar, you can Create an Alert for a particular search and when Google finds something new on the topic, they send you the link to the item in your email. I’ve gotten pdfs of Ph.D theses, scholarly articles, and the like from these search requests. When you finish the course, you can remove the search request and get no more emails. JStor is a service you need to sign up for but offers millions of academic papers and books for free, many of which you can download in pdf format. The JStor articles are often 10 years old or more, so it is not a good source for up to date papers. As a study group leader at BOLLI, you used to be able to get access to the Brandeis library (and online library) by getting a Brandeis Sponsored Account, which is an email in the form of YourName@Brandeis.edu, and a password, which Brandeis calls a Passphrase. Click here for instructions on how to get a Brandeis Sponsored Account. Once you had your email and passphrase, you could visit the Brandeis online library. and download articles. However, Brandeis recently stopped Bolli access to their online library services; we're trying to get it back. If your topic is related to medicine, then the National Institutes of Health’s Pubmed search service is invaluable.
For videos which you can embed on your web site or show in class, Youtube.com is the place to go. You can simply do a Google Search and when the search results page comes up, click on the Videos link at the top under the search box. Or go to Youtube.com and search there. Search for topic, but also search for the name of prominent authors or researchers in the field. If you have a subscription to Netflix.com or Amazon Prime Video, you can often find excellent documentaries as well which you can assign as homework for those participants that have an account. Ted Talks are a good source for eighteen minute videos on all kinds of topics; you can often use portions to illustrate a point in class. Be aware that your computers have copy protection built in; you can show Youtube or Ted Talk videos using Zoom, but if you try to show Netflix, Amazon Prime, or a DVD using Share Screen your students will just see a grey screen. One workaround is install the VLC media player on your computer; that will get around your computer’s default media player’s copyright protection so that you can show DVDs on Zoom. Another approach you can use is to convert your DVDs to mp4 files on your computer and then upload those files to Google Drive where they can be shared. You may also be able to convert Netflix or Amazon Prime Video videos to mp4 using a screen recorder, or a specialized piece of software like TunePat. Once converted, you can upload to your Google Drive and share the video with a link.
You can often find wonderful pictures or graphics, just by doing a Google search on a topic and when the search results page comes up, click on the Images link at the top under the search box. Google Image Search allows you to do a reverse image lookup, finding the source of a picture that you have on your computer by clicking the camera icon in the search box.
Once in a while you might get lucky by searching online courses at edX.org. Harvard, MIT and many other universities post online courses, often for free. These can have a wealth of materials which may be relevant to your course, or you might want to use an edX course as the framework for your course. You can also find other course frameworks on the web, such as various Diplomacy Simulations from the U.S. Diplomacy Center.
Be aware that much of the material you find on the internet is copyrighted and it is often illegal to wholesale copy or distribute it. Generally giving your readers links to information is OK; even if Youtube, for example, has a complete copy of a copyrighted movie or documentary, it is Youtube which is violating copyright law; you are in the clear as long as you just provide a link to it, or embed the Youtube on your web page. You can also distribute portions of articles or journal articles or books with attribution, but generally not the entire work. There is a doctrine of Fair Use that will allow you to share portions of a copyrighted work. There is no hard and fast rule about what percentage of a copyrighted work is considered fair use to distribute in an educational setting, but you’re probably OK with 10% or less. There is also a Classroom Use exemption that allows teachers to show copyrighted movies in a classroom setting, but it may not apply to Zoom classes. For more information see these articles:
Fair Use Doctrine and Copyright Law
Preparation for Class
Please read the materials above and think about how they might apply to your course ideas.
Please bring any questions that come to mind to class for discussion.
Please continue to refine your course topics. We’ll continue to work on refining your course topics for the next several weeks, allowing you to bounce questions and ideas off each other. As you start to find a topic which you’re excited about, consider how to organize the course: from a basis of Understanding by Design, or with primary sources or more broadly with open sources. Start looking for good sources and think about how you will work them into your course.