Giving students choices and the opportunity to co-design a course sounds like a great idea in theory. But what happens when you give them too much choice, and they are not in the position of make informed decisions? How do we avoid stress and anxiety around choosing when they don’t know why they are choosing one thing over another? Read about how we tackled the ‘paradox of choice’ in designing assignments and coming up with a final syllabus at the end of Week 3.
Read MoreIn Week 2, we try to build on the recommendations that the students made regarding favored topics and sources for information. The goal is to show them that there are opportunities to engage in the course content everywhere. Through our Extraction Exercise, we can learn how to link larger systemic topics to any stories related to the course that they see.
Read MoreBuilding momentum in the course co-design was going to be essential to our success. To continue our progress, we had to shift focus to what we were actually going to cover during the semester (topics), what we were going to do to engage those topics (assignments/activities), and what sources we could use to best facilitate student learning (materials).
Read MoreGetting buy-in is essential to any innovation and implementation. The question was, “How to get students who may not care about a topic to take part in the course’s construction?” In this post, we discuss the framing that was used to create buy-in, the techniques used to generate student learning goals, and how we created a shared sense of expectations to create a great course experience.
Read MoreThe beginning of the semester can bring a sense of excitement; syllabus day can bring a sense of dread. What if you came in the first day without a syllabus and turned the job over to the students? Read about how I took a sense of impending dread over the semester and turned it into an opportunity for student engagement, and (participatory) course co-design.
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