By Lindsay Richardson, Instructor, Department of Psychology & e-Learning Designer, TLS
Dear future self,
That feeling you’re experiencing – it’s extremely dangerous. You’re sitting there thinking of all the wonderful ways you could measure learning outcomes in your upcoming course: in-class activities, authentic evaluations, compassionate evaluation structures – oh my! It’s the perfect combination of motivation and enthusiasm and you feel invincible.
But before you go and throw caution to the wind, please heed my warning about getting in over your head – you’ll thank me later. Now is not the time to design an intricate and complex course. No – now is the time to keep it simple, superstar: four words that might save you immense pain over the course of the next 12 weeks.
Sure, your innovative ideas seem attractive and harmless now. After all, how much extra time could it really take to turn four assignments into choose your own adventure assignments? The students would love it and you’d be a hit! While you’re at it, why not spice up those bonus mark opportunities and let students choose how they earn bonus marks from a menu of options? One of the options could be leading a short review session each week. You could even have a peer leader sign-up sheet to allow students to take ownership of different weeks. Wait – why even make them sign up? You could create a leaderboard in Brightspace. Oooh – it could be a widget! It’ll only take a few hours to figure out the HTML code involved in making it dynamic. Then, you won’t have to manage it over the course of the academic term.
Stressed yet? No doubt – no matter how excited you might be, that’s an overwhelming train of thought you’ve just jumped on. It’s natural, though. During the off-season, you’ll often be filled with all sorts of wonderful ideas. You’ll collect these ideas and put them into a list, expecting your future self to be more than happy to take on the extra work. As you may imagine, though, future you will often be unimpressed with these unreasonable expectations. This is one of the workplace hazards of being your own boss: there is no one to remind you about setting realistic expectations and to caution you against putting more on your plate than you ought to handle.
Notice I said “ought to handle,” as there is a difference between your capacity and your comfort zone – and I want to encourage you to seek the latter. More often than not, these lists of great ideas can quickly lead to massive course overhauls. Sometimes, major changes are needed, but this type of course revamp can get out of hand very quickly.
Warning: this should not be done alone!
If you’ve decided an overhaul is needed, my best advice is to bring someone on board. Who are your supports for a task like this? If it’s a course you’ve taught in the past, maybe you could approach former students or teaching assistants. If it’s a new course for you, colleagues, peers, teaching mentors, educational developers and instructional designers can be great resources. At Carleton, the latter two can be found at Teaching and Learning Services (TLS), and these pieces of your support system puzzle should not be overlooked or underestimated. They have proven themselves to be extremely skilled in course design and pedagogy.
The last time you opted to overhaul your Statistics for Psychology course, you decided to completely revamp your final exam. Remember that? You wonderful, innovative, naïve human – good times. You expected 100-250 students and a handful of teaching assistants to support the course. This final would be a cumulative take home exam that required students to analyze, interpret and apply foundational concepts. You wanted it to be authentic, useful and memorable. Time to get to work! But as you began re-developing the materials (e.g., question banks, dataset, instructions, marking keys, rubrics), remember how alone you felt? It was isolating working in your own teaching silo on something which felt so… important.
On the one hand, as a PhD student, you were used to working independently, but this felt different. Teaching should involve a community, shouldn’t it? We’re out here shaping the minds of young adults – shouldn’t we be collaborating?
I would now like to flag one of the best decisions you made during this time: you reached out to your support system for feedback. First, you sent your newly developed exam to one of the educational developers at TLS for review and you weren’t totally sure what kind of feedback you would receive.
We. Were. Blown. Away.
The in-depth feedback and thoughtful suggestions were astounding and I remember you telling your educational developer “I can’t believe this is a FREE service for instructors” and asking “does everyone know about this?!” This initial reach out for help was extremely beneficial. The educational developer pointed out certain strengths of the exam, such as its authenticity, applicability and relevance. Perhaps most importantly, they provided us with unbiased insights that helped to improve the exam.
For example, on several occasions we had instructed students to do the thing and allotted a certain number of marks for the task. However, we failed to inform students where the marks were coming from exactly, and truthfully, we may not have even thought it all the way through. In other words, there was ambiguity in the grading scheme. Having the TLS staff member look at the exam, through the eyes of a learner, revealed many insights (e.g., what elements should my response contain to earn full marks on this question? Why is this question worth so much more than that one?) which allowed you to alter important components of the exam before sending it out for the next review.
After completing the review process with our expert educational developer, we sent the exam to our teaching assistants and instructed them to complete it as a group, providing both their answers and feedback about the exam in the form of areas of strength and areas for improvement. This crucial step had two main benefits. First, the teaching assistants experienced what students would have to do at the end of the term, which increased the likelihood that they would have empathy for the students while grading their exams. Second, this process gave us additional insight about our expectations of undergraduate students.
Spoiler alert: they were far too high!
As it turns out, the initial exam was asking second-year psychology students to do something that our graduate TAs couldn’t accomplish in the planned timeframe. This information allowed us to calibrate the difficulty of the exam for the learners who would be taking the course.
Remember, that was just one evaluation in one course, and my OH my did it ever take a lot of effort to redesign. So, even if there are good reasons to overhaul a course, here are a few good reasons not to, just to keep things in perspective for your wild-eyed, boundary-pushing self:
- Science – changing one variable at a time is how we can demonstrate effects of that variable. If you change too much and things still don’t work well, it can be hard to know what to do next.
- Time cost – it takes a considerable amount of time to overhaul a course. Your time is worth something and, as a contract instructor, it’s a flat rate for your commitment to the course. The more time you spend revamping things, the more your hourly wage decreases. For this reason, it’s imperative that you spend your valuable time wisely.
- Quality of overhaul – when you completely change everything, you cannot devote enough time and effort to any one thing to ensure its quality. Unless you have months to dedicate to thinking about and designing your course, you will likely end up feeling like a boulder is chasing you for the entirety of the term.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “but I want to make my course better for my students” and that’s great! Here are some ways you can do that effectively without overburdening yourself in the process:
- Pick one thing to adjust this term and focus on that. Are there small changes you could make which could make a big difference?
- Ask for feedback! Ask your students what they like and dislike about the course, look at your teaching evaluation comments if you have them, or reach out to your support system for feedback. A word of caution with this one, though: just because students have something to say about a course element doesn’t mean you have to change it. It does give you something to seriously consider, however.
- Add a social element to the course. Create spaces for students to connect with you and one another in more informal settings, whether online or in person (e.g., themed office hours, BYO lunch hour, online discussion forums unrelated to the class). This can make a world of difference and shouldn’t overburden you with time-intensive prep.
Now, take a deep breath and remember to Keep It Simple, Superstar. Also, it might be worth re-reading this letter on a yearly basis. It’s strange how often you need to be reminded to monitor how much you have on your plate, and to calibrate your enthusiasm and innovative spirit accordingly.
KISS KISS,
Your overzealous self.