Because of Northwestern University’s quarter system, teaching the same course four times each year can start to feel repetitive! One way to keep your course up to date and interesting is to incorporate current events into your course content and … Read More
Tag: course design
The first paragraph of your course syllabus states, “Welcome to the course! In this course, we will cover many topics.” The first paragraph of your colleagues’ syllabus states, “Welcome to the course! In this course, you will learn about many … Read More
One teacher I remember well is my seventh grade Texas History teacher. One reason he stands out was his unique ranking system, which ranked his top ten students from all his courses based on their grades. The better you did, … Read More
Online course design and teaching presents a unique set of challenges and rewards. There are dozens of new variables to consider, like course structure, content delivery, and synchronous sessions. There’s no face-to-face classroom interaction or collecting students work in real … Read More
Recently, IMC Professor Judy Franks presented an interesting issue: her student evaluation feedback indicated that her students absolutely loved her course, but were overwhelmed with the workload. In addition, she was asked to teach three sections of the course in … Read More
If you sit down with a learning designer at the School of Professional Studies to talk about a strategy for designing or redesigning your course and they suggest beginning with the end of the course in mind, you might find … Read More
Introduction
Many online classes provide resources as a weekly, no-nonsense bibliography, a chain of citations. It is an efficient, time-tested way of presenting resources, and there is some benefit to letting students forge their own reading path through them.
But … Read More
As much as we like to think our online courses are perfect, there is always room for improvement. Our job is never done. On the Distance Learning team, we are first and foremost concerned with partnering with faculty to develop … Read More
If you follow any higher education-related publication like Faculty Focus, The Chronicle of Higher Education, or Inside Higher Education you may have noticed that there has been ample discussion about rubrics. Topics like why use rubrics come up repeatedly … Read More
If you have designed or redesigned a course, then you have likely taken part in a conversation about the course syllabus. From these conversations, you know that the course has to have a syllabus prepared in advance, and that the … Read More