Course planning for the coming academic year is either underway or about to start. It offers a chance to look at how learning experiences—exams, assignments, and activities—are sequenced in a course and what they add up to collectively. Assembling learning experiences so that they effectively build content knowledge and promote intellectual growth requires responding to multiple factors and then balancing competing demands. For example, consider these three factors.
Timing and the motivation to learn. I just read an interesting study (LaTour & Noel, 2021) that compared “binge learning” in online and regular courses. Yes, binge learning is as it sounds: an attempt to learn a lot of content all at once. It usually occurs in conjunction with exams and assignment due dates. As in face-to-face courses, some online students “space” learning across the course, but a lot more binge-learn at the end. Interestingly, though, some online students do binge learning at the front end of the course, and that raises some intriguing course planning options.
Course beginnings do motivate students. They offer a fresh start, bad grades have yet to be earned, students optimistically imagine doing well, and coursework has yet to pile up. For these reasons, some students are inclined to work harder at the beginning of a course. It’s worth considering how to take advantage of course beginnings. What kinds of assignments and activities build on the energy and enthusiasm students are more likely to feel when the course starts?
Student motivation ebbs and flows depending on what’s happening in all their courses. Exams piled up around midterm encourage binge learning and promote anxiety, as does working simultaneously on several writing assignments. Hearing from students about these calendar crunches can help teachers better position their assignments within the workflow of the semester or term.
Coordinating content and assignment placement. Teachers plan exams and set assignment deadlines in line with how the course content unfolds. In some courses content unfolds in a linear fashion, with concepts building on each other. In other courses content chunks may circle around each other or be positioned in relationship to some larger category. Regardless of how the various content pieces relate, in every course students should see why the content belongs and how it fits together.
We rely on course objectives, learning outcomes, and assessment activities to make courses coherent. But it seems to me they partition better than they integrate; they show us how individual pieces relate better than they reveal the overall course structure. I worry that content in courses still comes off as a discipline’s topical miscellany.
Exams and assignments can reinforce content connectedness. Cumulative exams and comprehensive finals achieve two goals: they provide students with repeated experiences to learn the content, and they promote learning better than unit exams. Cumulative exams also help students see how the content takes shape across a course.
Developmental trajectory of the learning experiences. Activities and assignments exist so that each student has the chance to interact with the content, and those experiences can be framed differently. If students write papers, work in groups, do labs, solve problems, build models, or design artifacts, they have a range of learning experiences. If they only take multiple-choice exams, they don’t. Course planning is the time to consider the kind and quantity of learning experiences needed in the course and by students.
Beyond which learning experiences and how many, teachers need to look at the sequencing of those learning experiences—positioning them in an order that moves skill development and knowledge acquisition forward across the course. Most often teachers increase the difficulty of assignments, but that isn’t the only option. Maybe the skill (say, working with others in a group) is best developed by having students perform different roles in the group or by experiencing different kinds of groups (study groups; those that critique the work of other groups, solve problems, do projects, or make presentations).
Last week I saw this Joseph Addison quote on the front of a high school: “What sculpture is to the block of marble, education is to the human soul.” Now I’m thinking that courses may be those blocks of marble—big heavy chunks with potential. Courses can be shaped, sculptured into forms full of significant meaning. Teachers with three, four, sometimes five course blocks to shape don’t have time to create a Pietà. But even small attempts to carve out course pieces, to make the marble something more than a rock, can touch students and embolden their quest for education. This understanding takes course planning to a whole different plane.
Reference
LaTour, K. A., & Noel, H. N. (2021). Self-directed learning online: An opportunity to binge. Journal of Marketing Education, 43(2), 174–188. https://doi.org/10.1177/0273475320987295
