COURSE DESIGN AND ON THE CUTTING EDGE: CHANGING FACULTY APPROACHES TO COURSE DEVELOPMENT TO MAKE COURSES INNOVATIVE AND MORE EFFECTIVE

One of the major threads woven throughout the professional development program On the Cutting Edgehas been the design of effective and innovative undergraduate courses that are consistent with both pedagogical best practice and cognitive science research on how people learn. We view an effective course as one in which students learn significant and appropriate content and skills, gain practice in thinking for themselves and solving problems in the discipline, and leave the course prepared to use their knowledge and skills in the future.

We offered our first course design workshop in 1996, half a decade before the inception of On the Cutting Edge, at a time when few faculty had pedagogical training and courses were typically organized around content mastery. Our approach includes setting student-focused goals involving higher-order thinking skills (what do you want your students to be able to do as a result of having taken your course?), choosing content through which students can achieve the goals (rather than designing a course around a list of content items or textbook chapters), moving away from traditional lecture toward active engagement of students, and designing assignments that give students meaningful practice both to help them make progress toward achieving the goals and also to give instructors authentic ways of measuring progress.

On the Cutting Edge incorporated this approach to course design in four ways: 1) as six face-to-face course design workshops, 2) as six online course design workshops, 3) as a self-paced online Course Design tutorial (https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/index.html, catalogued in MERLOT), and 4) as a component of other Cutting Edge workshops (e.g., Early Career, Preparing for an Academic Career, and Teaching X). Beyond Cutting Edge, we offered workshops to interdisciplinary audiences at 11 national meetings of the NSF-funded SENCER (Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities) Project and at 42 individual colleges, universities, and institutes in the US and abroad between 2002 and 2017, reaching on the order of 3000 faculty in a wide variety of disciplines. Participant comments indicate that our course design process changes faculty thinking about course design and has a far-reaching impact on other courses that our participants teach.