Teacher Talk
Semester prep and revolving discussions about course design; plus, a links round-up of course design advice
It’s that time of year when discussions about course prep and syllabus design abound. Even though I am on maternity leave this semester, I am not unmoved by the discussions that inevitably arise around this time when faculty are attending department workshops, revising syllabi, and scrambling to build out their LMS. I am doing some of this myself (to the extent possible) for the spring semester so that I am not having to do this mad dance with a newborn in my arms. That being said, this is the first time that I can take my time to do this work. Non-academics (and perhaps some obnoxious academic types who teach one class over and over) might ask the question: don’t you normally have four months every summer to do this? Oh, sweet child (or old fool, as the case my be). For many, there’s barely a respite between summer sessions and fall sessions. Others, thanks to the precarity that has become the bedrock of higher ed, receive their class assignments at the last minute and, even if they are the same types of classes from term to term, they are in different modalities and/or different session types (try adapting a 16 week course face-to-face course to a 6 week hybrid course model). Still others try to cram all the other work we are expected to do into the summer months that we do not have time for during teaching terms and, as a result, end up with only a few weeks to pull together course materials. There might be just enough time to shoe-horn your materials into a new term, but not enough to reshoot instruction videos, retool lessons, rework assignment language — all the things we dream about for the next term as the current semester unfolds before us.
I feel some urgency (baby is coming after all), but not the usual urgency that I feel at this point in August when I’m usually trying to check off my massive prep list before the start of term while trying also to enjoy my last few days of summer and dealing with teacher-anxiety dreams (no longer am I a student in front of the class in my underwear, but now a teacher who shows up to the wrong classroom without a syllabus). Right now, I mostly feel the pressure by proxy - reading tweets about syllabus design, checking the department slack channel for the latest question-and-responses chain, and the normal, casual conversations with colleagues leading up to a new term. Below is a round-up of some of these conversations with my own 2 cents thrown in. It can be hard to have generative discussions about teaching decisions because teachers are often incredibly attached to their choices, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them. It takes time — a luxury many of us in higher ed lack — to mull things over and make the changes we think will best serve our students. So having these conversations over and over has value even if it feels a little hamster-wheely.
Due Dates, LMSing, and Managing Expectations
In a recent slack conversation, a colleague asked if we set due dates in Blackboard because it is a pain to have to change them all from semester to semester. I’m not sure of this person’s experience with teaching in general let alone teaching with a robust LMS presence (thanks, Covid), but this has always been the most labor-intensive part for me, as someone who taught asynchronous classes before the pandemic. I wish there was a button in Blackboard that let me tell it to auto-populate the corresponding dates from one term to the next, but there is no such button. Depending on how ever-green you made your course to begin with, it may involve changing a hundred dates and, inevitably, missing a few. In her question, I saw two facets - 1) using due dates at all and 2) strategies for making it easier to set up a course in our LMS from one term to the next. My reply focused on facet 2 which I perceived to be the real issue, and so I recommended an approach that was taught to me by my own mentor: get IT to give you blackboard course shells (one for each term you teach) so you can strip your course content of dates and then add them back after you course copy from the right shell (thus reducing the risk of having incorrect dates; not a solution, however, to the laborious task of inserting new dates each term for which I don’t have a solution). To my surprise, the conversation in the slack channel pivoted away from the LMS question to the question of having due dates at all. Some colleagues had no due dates for small-stakes assignments, but fixed ones for major assignments. Some had none in the LMS but only on the syllabus. Some (apparently?) had none anywhere - although I cannot see how that would work. Then we got into a discussion of which due dates we should have for an asynchronous course in particular, and I jumped in again to offer my thoughts after doing this for four years, citing student preferences as articulated to me over time. Objections and supporting statements for my approach abounded. I kind of left the thread after that because it didn’t seem like we were going to agree on a single approach, but what I wish I had added was a comment I hear from students every term which is: it isn’t the particular teacher approach to a class that confuses them; rather, it’s the fact that all classes are conducted differently that fosters confusion. And from our brief slack conversation, I could see what the students meant. This isn’t to say that we need to standardize, completely, how we deliver classes to students (although there are OWI standards for asynch classes that some of my colleagues seemed to not know or to ignore), but rather that we need to make a better effort to manage expectations for our students even if that means spending five hours entering stupid dates into the LMS. They are juggling a lot - more than I was even as an undergrad who regularly took an overload. The least I can do is help them remember, with redundancy, when something is due. Is it more work for me? Yes, but it is also less work. I never get a question about when something is due unless I happen to have missed one of the changed dates on the front or back end of the LMS in which case I just remind them that I’m only human and our LMS sucks.
Setting Up a Syllabus
Right now, the Academic Twitter (in addition to commentary on a rather horrifying auto-ethnography paper that recently came out) is flooded with syllabus setup tweets. Many of us have to use an approved department template for our syllabi which seems to go on and on, but which I have come to appreciate as it happens to include more actual useful stuff for students (like links to counseling services). I want to add even more things, like where our food pantry is located, but I usually create spaces in our Blackboard site for this information (instead of a syllabus quiz you could have students do a LMS scavenger hunt for this kind of info!). I usually like all the Twitter advice about how to make your syllabus more inclusive. I don’t always agree with advice on how to actually do the course schedule/assignments part of syllabus because it often begins with “selecting course readings.” Um no. I begin with the university calendar (and my own calendar - especially related to any scheduled conferences) as well as major assignment scaffolding sequences (which might involve working classes or student conferences) because how on earth can I begin to select readings until I know how many days my students will actually have to complete said readings? If you are relatively new to teaching, take it from me, don’t start with the readings. It is painful to have to cut readings you’ve carefully chosen (and perhaps read, reread or annotated, built lessons for, etc.) after realizing that your university squeezed another holiday into the calendar and didn’t tell you.
Syllabus Day
A close friend and colleague and I were chatting about her prep when she reminded me of something we both heard in the college-wide orientation we attended years ago. Folks from the teaching and learning center suggested that we do not have a “syllabus day” as the first class — a longstanding higher ed tradition. My friend said she could not give up going over the syllabus because, in her experience, no quiz substitute (one of the alternatives recommended by the t&l folks) will suffice for setting students up for success in her class. I agreed, but also, over the many years I’ve been teaching, my syllabus day has evolved from taking the whole class to go over it to taking only part of the class to go over the most important pieces of it. Now I spend about 1/3 of time on the syllabus, 1/3 on students getting to know one another, and 1/3 on some small, discussion-based activity designed to illustrate what exactly we intend to do in that class. This change in approach happened mainly because I hate reading over the syllabus, and I wanted to find a way to do that work but also enjoy the first class of the term. Perhaps the answer is: do what you love. Your enthusiasm is infectious, and the students will be cognizant of the energy you have for the topic at hand.
What advice do you have for course prep and/or syllabus design?
More Links to Help w/ Class Prep
10 Tips for Virtual Synchronous Participation
Happy course prepping ya’ll!
~Tawnya
Best of luck with the baby, and thanks for recommending my newsletter!