Why are some courses a dynamic, meaningful, and lasting experience, while others inspire lukewarm engagement and results despite the instructor’s best efforts? In his excellent new book, Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning , higher-education and pedagogy expert, Ken Bain, goes beyond typical course checklists and explores how teachers foster a natural critical learning environment, where activities and collaborations are designed around questions and challenges that students are intrinsically curious about and find deep and emotional value in solving. The book is filled with stories and syllabi of real-life examples of these super courses and begins with a concise analysis of 18 characteristics that were consistently observed in Bain’s research. Here are the 18 characteristics, paraphrased for brevity, and supplemented with examples that could be used in face-to-face, hybrid, or fully online courses: Core course design and policy: The course is centered around big, inte...

You may have heard Aesop’s fable of The Tortoise and the Hare . The two are pitted against each other in a race. The Hare is confident in his speed making him the clear winner, against the Tortoise’s slow and languid gate. The speedy Hare stops for a nap, and the Tortoise passes him and wins the race. The moral of the tale adds up to “slow and steady wins the race”. But what if we could learn from both the Tortoise and the Hare in our course revision and instructional design practices and win the race together? Tortoise: Managing Workload Over Time As instructors, we may be very much aware of the things we love about our courses or those that we wish we could change. Sometimes the small suggestions of an extra assignment, more active learning, updated readings, recording new lectures, updating an outdated learning technology can be…overwhelming. The Tortoise is the prime example of how to approach this process. Slow and steady. We are in our teaching for the long haul. We don’t need to...

Writing strong objectives for your course can help you : plan better assignments assess students easier communicate clearly to students Strong objectives can help students : understand what they are learning why they are learning it how to meet the requirements of the course Finally, objectives help align institution, program and courses to meet the learning needs of the community. During our webinar, we discussed the steps to writing objectives , including choosing verbs from Bloom's Taxonomy . We demonstrated a couple of  technologies to help you write them like ASU's Objective Builder. We also took time to practice evaluating and writing our own objectives. Below are some of the resources that were shared. Resources: PowerPoint Slides Video recording of Webinar Technologies   ASU's Objective Builder Easy Generator The Padagogy Wheel Other Resources: Writing Measurable Learning Objectives Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes  ABCD M...