Course Syllabus

Derek Bok Center "Teagle Seminar"

Designing the Course of the Future

Please see the Announcements List on the seminar site for the latest updates on homework, office hours, etc.  The Assignment List is at the end of the Syllabus.

Rationale and Goals

Our next generation of faculty will need to design courses for a new breed of learners—post-millennial students whose instant access to information acquired from multiple sources is markedly different from that of previous generations.  This seminar will both deepen and draw upon a growing interest in FAS to develop stronger measurements of the effectiveness of pedagogical approaches, as called for in the Harvard Compact to Improve Teaching (2007). Whereas most efforts to date have focused on improving courses once they are already underway, this seminar will focus especially on course creation, offering a benchmark for the best practices of course design, and ultimately providing a model for faculty as well as for graduate students.

-- Paraphrased from the Teagle Foundation proposal for this seminar.

Instructional Staff

• John Girash, Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. [John's contact info and office hours]
  
• Aylin Tschoepe, DCF Pedagogy Fellow
• Terry Aladjem, Executive Director of the Derek Bok Center.
• Virginia Maurer, Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center.
• Marlon Kuzmick, Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center.
• Ellen Sarkisian, Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center.
• Other Bok Center staff, guest speakers and workshop leaders.

For contact information etc., see the seminar website https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/196.

Participants

GSAS students distributed among humanities, social sciences, and math & natural sciences (including SEAS), who have at least some prior teaching experience will be given priority up to an application deadline date.  Enrollment is limited, and other participants (e.g., postdocs and visiting scholars) will be enrolled as space permits.  Due to the scope of the subject matter, there will be a fairly heavy reading workload similar to what might be expected in a graduate seminar course.  Participants will also take charge of leading parts of the discussion and may be expected to meet in working groups outside of class time, e.g. roughly once per topic unit.

Products

To demonstrate and solidify their learning, each participant will produce the following individually or in groups:

• A brief blog post summarizing the key ideas of a given week (a "scribe")
• A "Glimpse of the Future": brief blog (possibly video) post and in-class presentation that reports on something happening here at Harvard or in your field that relates to a given week's readings
• A short (2 or 3 pages) course proposal or rationale document to act as a guide for further design
• A field-specific statement of learning goals
• An innovative assignment paired with a rationale and a grading and assessment rubric, or alternatively an innovative lesson plan, complete with materials and rationale
• A syllabus (the default), curriculum/program of study, or a substantive article on this level of design (at the end of term), to be presented in a "Syllabus Fair" during Reading Period and published in an online Syllabus Gallery of all participants' designs.  [Galleries for the 2013, 2012 and 2011 seminars are available online.]

In addition, each discussion week one participant will summarize the week's readings to lead off discussion.

Topics and Schedule

Links for all readings and viewings are provided in the online syllabus.  Weekly readings may be revised as the seminar progresses; check the Assignment List for updates.

*** Note: the readings for March 6 are heavier than most; you may want to start early on them. ***

Unit 1: The Big Picture. College-level teaching and curricula past, present and future, from institutional and disciplinary perspectives.

Feb 6. Curricular Design & the purpose of liberal education.

Feb. 13.

1. Workshop: What do students learn in your field?  And what would you want them to learn in your course?  Learning goals & outcomes in the disciplines.  Led by Virginia Maurer.
2. Open discussion with Prof. David Cox of MCB 80x.

Feb. 20.  Schools of the Future?  What can we learn about, and from, nontraditional methods of 'delivering' courses, such as the Khan Academy and MIT's OpenCourseWare.

Feb. 27.

1. Workshop: Course Proposals/Rationales.
2. Course Design Primer.  Led by Ellen Sarkisian

Unit 2: Learning and Teaching.  What is learning -- or what does it mean to learn -- and what do we know about the process? How do concepts such as “knowledge”, “retention”, and “performance” relate to learning and understanding?

Mar. 6. The Problem of Knowledge.  What do philosophy, cognitive science, and the disciplines say about knowledge?  Led by Marlon Kuzmick and John Girash

Mar. 13. Communication, Writing and Student Assignments. Teaching, assessment, and retention in the “print” world of speaking and writing and in the “post-print” milieu of networks, video, and new media.  Led by Aylin Tschoepe and Marlon Kuzmick.

Mar. 20. Spring Break, no class.  But, by March 27 please upload a draft of your "innovative assignment" to the seminar site and then download at least 2 others' for previewing (as assigned on March 13).

Mar. 27. Workshop: Innovative Assignments.  Give & collect feedback on the assignments you previewed during break week.

Unit 3: Your course of the future.  Your work in April will largely be in refining your course/syllabus designs in prep for the May 1 Fair. 

Apr. 3. Syllabus Design Primer Led by Terry Aladjem.  Details TBA.

Apr. 10.  Guest Discussant: Vincent Brown

Apr. 17. Syllabus Fair presentation workshop. Seminar participants will showcase their work for each other and for the greater community on May 1; this week we'll look at your draft designs.

Apr. 24. no meeting, work on your syllabi presentations!

May 1. Symposium + Syllabus Fair, CSIS S-030.  Setup 1pm, internal viewings 1:30-2:30, Fair 3-4:30, cleanup 4:30-5pm.