Enhancing Large Course Design

CAE's Academic Innovation Mini-grant (AIM) program supports, encourages, and enhances faculty innovation in areas that forward the University’s mission and goals. The "Enhancing Large Course Design" AIM program convened a group of interdisciplinary faculty who, over several meetings in winter & spring 2011, worked on individual projects while benefiting from discussions with their fellow AIM colleagues and resources offered by them and by CAE. Each participant developed a project addressing a core question, issue, or theme related to one or more of her/his large course(s) and wrote a 500-750 word reflection on what was learned through completing the project. An example is posted below.

Critical Thinking, Controversy, and Large Course Design

Peter Boghossian

Background

I have very little experience with large course enrollments. I've been teaching for nearly 20 years, but I've never had a class with more than 90 students. Next term I'll be teaching a critical thinking class with  more than 120 students. If this goes well, then this will be the first of many such large classes that I'll be teaching.

Implementation

I will make my learning objectives more explicit. Specifically, in my Critical Thinking and Science and Pseudoscience classes, I will tell students exactly what my goal is regarding their beliefs—to help them to change their beliefs with regard to factual information.  I did this for the first time in my current class (I read students the other deliverable I wrote for this grant), and I was astonished at the overwhelmingly positive response I received.

In  my ethics classes, I will also make it more explicit that the political, ethical, social, etc. conclusions students come to are not important with respect to the larger learning objectives of the class.  What is important is the process that one uses to arrive at a conclusion. (In this particular context, I will also spend more time on what philosophers call "the fact-value distinction").

Summary & Reflection

I applied for this grant so that I could learn how to successfully navigate controversial issues in an environment that's not "intimate," that is, one that's not a small classroom setting with 10 or 15 students. I'd like to develop tools and strategies for dealing with controversial issues in the context of a large class.

There were many excellent resources, but I found Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do to be the most helpful. In particular, I revisited ideas about successful teaching (pp. 48-50 and connected this to other bodies of literature. Specifically, Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Habit #2: "Begin with the end in mind") and Bain overlap in terms of pushing me to design my classes based upon the learning deliverable first, and then selecting the appropriate content that will help students achieve that deliverable. I have already "reverse engineered" elements of my critical thiking class by tailoring class content (readings, lectures, etc.) to predetermined learning outcomes.

First, I'd like to attend a seminar on clickers. I'd like to learn about the different types of clickers and I'd like to see those "in action." I'd also like to know if there's an infrastructure in place for guiding faculty through the entire process (from first buying a clicker, to designing Power Points, to use in the classroom).

Second, I'd like to examine the differences between classes with 120 students (which I'm teaching now) and classes with 200 students (which I may be teaching if budget cuts continue). I'd like to know if there are different padagogies or strategies, along with accompanying challenges, for teaching classes of 200+ students.

Third and finally, I'd like to learn more strategies for teaching large hybrid classes. Specifically, I'm interested in questions of time management in an online environment.