My favorite course to teach starts now! Here's my syllabus for my graduate seminar in professional development and career planning. 

SYLLABUS SPRING 2021

This Fall, I taught a 344 student general education course on individual and family development across the lifespan. You can see my syllabus here.
 
Today, at great personal cost to my self-esteem, I read and summarized all written responses from 266 students (78% response rate). How did I summarize? Learn more about my technique, and why. 
 
I am going to share the summary of every single response with you. Then, I’m going to summarize differences between perceived strengths and weaknesses of this semester compared to Fall 2018 in person. Then, I’m going to share what these ratings (granted, just one class) can tell us about how to support students’ online learning in large classes. I share this information because it was hard for me to find in Summer 2020. Our university does an excellent job in preparing online instructors, and offered many additional trainings and workshops for faculty to take their classes online. But our online classes are historically designed to be relatively small, and so some of the best practices do not easily scale to large format classes.
 
I consulted with Suzanne LaFleur, Director of Facuty Development at UConn’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, who helped me talk through ideas and provided some great advice that I incorporated.
 
It’s important to note that the way I structured the course only worked because I had substantial TA support. Communication and grading with 350 students would have been impossible if I did not have that kind of support.
 
You can find the full summary of every single positive comment and suggestion for change here.
 
Here are the most common responses, noted by 10 or more students, to the question, “What was the most positive aspect of the way in which this instructor taught this course?”
 

* La-de-da. Let’s pretend we didn’t notice how long it’s been since I last posted.
 
Here is my syllabus for Fall, 2020 in HDFS 1070, a general education lifespan class on individual and family development. The course was fully remote.
 
Here is my syllabus from Fall 2019, fully in person.
 
Here are the things I changed/adjusted to be fully remote:

• More office hours: I had WebEx office hours 3 times a week during the scheduled class time
• Videos instead of live lectures: I had recordings of (almost) all my lectures from Fall 2019. I had recorded them for a student with accommodations to view recorded lectures outside of class times. I can’t tell you how many times I said how lucky I was. I emailed this student in August and thanked her. Instead of posting 50 minute lectures, though, I chunked the three 50-minute lectures into about 10 videos per week.
• Introduction videos: In addition to the pre-recorded lectures, I made weekly intro videos (more on these in my next post) in which I went over the week’s topic, reviewed assignments and expectations, and tried to make the class feel more connected/personalized through a range of techniques.
• Exams: My exams were already online. But, I decreased the percent of the grade based on exams from 60% to 50%, and thus increased the percent of grade from assignments.
• Independent assignments: Previously, students completed one weekly online assignment that applied course material to their own experiences – for instance, to take an online life expectancy calculator and answer questions about the feedback. Instead, I added lecture assignments – about one question to answer after each of the week’s 10 videos. Some were just comprehension/recall. Some were more application, such as “think of a movie/TV show/book.  What type of love (based on the Triangle of Love) do they demonstrate in this example, and what evidence is there for that type (you may need to consult the textbook to see all of the categories)?”
• Group assignments: In person, I have unannounced, approximately weekly in class assignments that they do in spontaneously formed groups of about three people, where they apply the day’s material to an application question – for instance, “Over Thanksgiving break, your 40-year-old aunt, who learned you took a class on lifespan development, asks you what she should do so that the next couple decades of her life go well. Based on what you learned about MIDLIFE, what are three pieces of advice that you will give her? Make sure each piece of advice is something she can actually act on (e.g., not, “become a grandparent” or “don’t experience menopause”). And, make sure each piece of advice is something we learned in this class, either from lecture or the textbook.” I converted these to weekly online group assignments, to be done during scheduled class time. I assigned groups of 8-9 at the start of the semester, and students could use Blackboard Collaborate or any form they wanted to meet. They had to submit one google doc with their collaborative response. Of all the class design changes, this one caused the most headache for me and the TAs (as I anticipated – I was right!). Students often didn’t actually meet but worked asynchronously. Students complained that they couldn’t meet during the scheduled (class) time. Students complained that some group members didn’t show up but added their name to the google doc, anyway. Not sure how I would do it differently next time, but I would probably do it differently.
• Dropped assignments: I increased the number of each type of assignment that students could drop – generally added one additional drop.

 
“Introductory Individual and Family Development: Remote, large section class syllabus first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on January 5, 2021.”