Title: How to design a class. Ah, summer. That time when teachers… | by Amy J. Ko | Bits and Behavior | Medium
Headings: How to design a class
How to design a class
Seven steps to designing a class
1. Devise and sequence learning objectives
2. Ideate instruction, practice, and feedback for objectives
3. Iteratively sketch, evaluate and refine a syllabus
4. Layer on extrinsic motivation (grades)
5. Extract action items
6. Teach the course
7. Synthesize reflections into revisions
How long does this take?
What if you’re inheriting course materials?
Can’t I just do lectures, homeworks, and exams?

Content: None of this helps shape a teacher’s process, and so instead, most teachers use a strategy of bricolage: take an existing syllabus, combining it with other materials, and adapt it as necessary. While bricolage can work fine, it’s not a great recipe for innovative or effective teaching, especially if the example you’re adapting isn’t very good (and most aren’t). Moreover, adapting a course to new learning objectives can often break it, because effective classes can have many highly interconnected parts, each carefully designed to serve a specific goal. Since I’m often in the position of designing new courses (as part of my teaching and curriculum design duties, but also as part of my research on computing education), in this post I’m going to try to distill my process into something others can follow. I can’t promise it’s a great process or that it will work for you, but after applying it to a few courses, such as my course on HCI+Design, I have some weak evidence that it at least leads to strong student engagement, which is a precursor to learning. The steps I follow go something like this: Devise and sequence learning objectives
Ideate instruction, practice, and feedback for objectives
Iteratively sketch, evaluate and refine a syllabus
Layer extrinsic motivation (grades)
Extract action items
Teach the course
Synthesize reflections into revisions
I’ll walk through each of these steps, giving guidance on why each is important and how I approach each. Seven steps to designing a class
1. Devise and sequence learning objectives
The first Zelda game
The fundamental goal of any course is to help students learn something.