Serendipity35

Most teachers have stated learning objectives for their courses. They describe what we plan to teach and how we plan to assess students.

You may have read this summer about a case involving whether a professor can be required to write those down on a syllabus. A professor at the College of Charleston brought a lawsuit against the school that claimed that he was losing his job for refusing to include learning outcomes (the same as objectives?) in his syllabus.

The answer to the question of whether a course can not have learning objectives is a pretty resounding No. Of course, I'm sure students could point out some truly dreadful courses that did not have clear objectives or outcomes. Whether they are stated explicitly to students, probably in the syllabus, is the real question in that case. My answer to this second question of whether or not a course can not have clearly stated objectives is a resounding Yes.

Faculty need to consciously establish their goals and objectives in designing the course, but they also need to communicate those to students.

I would say that kind of information information should be available to a student before she even signs up for the course, perhaps in a course catalog or online page about the course. The objectives should also be explained in greater detail in the syllabus and in the course itself.

That is an instructional design task. I was very surprised how difficult it was to get faculty that I worked with on course design to understand the difference between a goal and an objective. We can get bogged down and confused in talking about goals, objectives and outcomes. If faculty are confused, certainly the students will be confused as well.

In a bit of an oversimplification, a goal is an overarching principle that guides decision making, while objectives are specific, measurable steps that can be taken to meet the goal.

You can further muddy this academic water by adding similar, but not interchangeable, terms such as competencies and outcomes. In this document I found online and used in some version for faculty workshops, it says: "From an educational standpoint, competencies can be regarded as the logical building blocks upon which assessments of professional development are based. When competencies are identified, a program can effectively determine the learning objectives that should guide the learners’ progress toward their professional goals. Tying these two together will also help identify what needs to be assessed for verification of the program’s quality in its effectiveness towards forming competent learners...In short, objectives say what we want the learners to know and competencies say how we can be certain they know it."

Whatever terminology you use, teachers need to know the larger goals in order to design the ways they will be presented and how they will be measured. Students need to knew as early as possible those last two parts.

 

If you are a K-12 teacher planning for back-to-school, it would be worth looking at Khan Academy. It has become more than just a place to send students to watch tutorial videos - though that is still a good application. Since they have set up dashboards and made it easier for you to enroll your students in a virtual "class" on their site, the use of the tutorials is far easier to control and monitor.

For example, combat the summer slump by having your students refresh their math skills with rigorous math practice on Khan Academy. Setting up a class is quite easy.

Go to https://www.khanacademy.org to sign up or login to set up your class.

An August teacher ritual: finalizing the syllabus. Syllabi is still more of a higher ed requirement than in high school, but at any grade level teachers have to determine how much reading, writing, and other work to assign.

When it comes to course credit hours, did you know that there is actually a federal definition for work outside class?  A credit hour should have a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work per week for a semester hour. That means that a student should expect at least six hours of out-of-class work per week for each 3-credit course. With a 5 course load, that is 30 hours.

How realistic is that? I would expect that number to sound really big to most students. And I'm not sure that a professor would expect that much work from a student. Then again, it is tough to estimate just how long it will take a student to do assigned readings, study for tests and do papers or other assignments.

Can technology help? Two faculty at Rice University, Elizabeth Barre and Justin Esarey, have developed an online Course Workload Estimator tool. On the page, they give an explanation of their way of estimating and point out that “there is very little research about the amount of time it takes the average college student to complete common academic tasks.” Though they used existing research on reading speed and comprehension and a study of students’ self-reported time spent on writing assignments, it still comes down to being an "estimate."

They allow for some manual adjustments for things like paperback versus textbook, how many new concepts are in the reading and the purpose of the readings (survey, understand or engage).

When I was working on the design of many online courses that had been taught face-to-face, I found that many faculty underestimated how much time it would take students to complete all the reading and assignments for the course. Even if you took the time to read a chapter yourself, your speed and comprehension isn't comparable to that of a student.

I like the idea of using something like this estimator and hope it goes through further development and refinement. Frustration on the part of students and faculty over meeting expectations migh decrease.

A recent story on NPR asked "Should Computer Education Cover More Than Just Coding?" My answer is, "Yes." You can read their story for the full details, but the takeaways are that teaching other computer (really "technology") skills and the accompanying "soft" skills like critical thinking often require coding.

For example, students learning to work with and structure data, or ones working with an Arduino will need to use code and understand basic concepts such as algorithms.