Registration is now open to post-secondary educators who wish to attend the spring session of the Course Design Intensive (CDI), to be held in June. Participants in the three-day intensive workshop work, individually and collaboratively, to design or re-design a course they are (or will be) teaching. Throughout the workshop, participants acquire a broadened understanding of course design concepts, and gain skills and tools they can apply to their own course.
Michael Lee, senior instructor at the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, participated in the CDI in 2015, when he decided to address the meaning and the significance of learning in his courses.
“As an instructor, I am mindful of making the significance of the course clear to my students,” said Lee. He says the CDI helped him think about his course from other perspectives.
After the workshop, Lee had a peer evaluator attend one of his classes and give him additional feedback on the areas he could work on and change. Following the classroom observation, Lee worked on revamping the Advanced Psychological Workshop, an intensive, two-week course for Master of Occupational Therapy students. And in 2017 he taught the modified course for the first time to 52 students.
Patrick Walls, another CDI participant and instructor in the Math Department, agrees. “I talked to a lot of math instructors about what we teach and how we teach it, and what’s important. But it’s so interesting talking to someone from a completely different faculty about what you teach and how you teach it, because the teaching takes so many different forms – assessments, technology and how to manage a class,” he said.
“Then you start really thinking about what you’re doing, and how that compares to what other people are doing. So it really was about meeting people from other faculties and thinking about things that I’d never really thought about before,” the math instructor added.
After participating in the CDI with Lee in 2015, Walls used his experience in the workshop to re-design MATH 210, a course on mathematical computing. He says the workshop helped him think about the big ideas for the course and align his objectives with his vision.
“The CDI really gave me an opportunity to think about and organize my ideas specifically for my class. As an instructor, it is so easy to get stuck in planning all the details of a course. The CDI helped remind me to keep coming back to the big ideas. I used the concept of alignment to guide me as I planned class activities and assessments that always pointed to the same goals.”
The next Course Design Intensive will be held on Monday, June 12, Wednesday, June 14 and Friday, June 16. For more information or to register visit: http://events.ctlt.ubc.ca/events/course-design-intensive-june-2017/