Course Design Project

Outcomes

 

Introduction

On an ongoing basis during this course you will work with a small group of your peers to produce a single course design document for a computer science course targeting an age-appropriate audience of your choosing. To accomplish this, you will use the Understanding By Design (UbD) process that we discussed in TLP and which you will review during week two of this course.

Grading for Equity states that, as much as possible, grades should be based on individual work and not on group work. That makes sense. My goal is to assess YOUR learning and that isn't always clear from a group deliverable. As such, this project actually generates five assessments used in the determination of your final grade. This consists of:

 

Getting Started

In order to give you some structure and guidance for what I want from this activity I have divided your design document up in to 8 sections. Each of those sections is described below as well as in a template design document you can copy from my Google Drive:

I ask that someone from your team go into the folder, COPY the design template, and label it clearly as belonging to your group.

 

 

Sections

 

  1. Explaining the Course and Audience (Due Sunday, June 22)
    • I have made an effort to group you with classmates who are interested in working on the same general type of course. However, it is important that everyone (you, your teammates, and me) are all clear on the details of what kind of course you are designing. For the sake of this project you need to come to a common ground so that you are all clear on the course you are currently designing.
    • Begin this design document by clearly identifying the type of course you are designing. 
      • What would the "course catalog" description of this course look like?
      • How long is this course? (semester, yearlong, major unit, etc.)
      • Who is the target audience (grade, is it required/optional, etc)
      • Are there prerequisites for this course?
      • Will this course be a prerequisite for additional courses later in the curriculum
      • Is the course a standalone CS course or is it integrated into one or more other subjects?
    • Make sure that this section is clear and not just a short bullet list.  It is likely 1/2 to a full page of written material to clarify this amongst yourselves and future readers.

     

  2. Course Outcomes (Due Sunday, July 6)
    • Using the Iowa/CSTA CS Standards as a starting point (but not as a limitation or restriction), generate a list of the outcomes required by students for this course. 
    • This part of the document is the driving point for the entire process.  So don't oversimplify this stage of the process.  As a team have a thorough discussion about what would belong in your course from a topic perspective and what outcomes you are looking for when considering whether students have mastered those topics.
    • You may organize these outcomes in any way that makes sense for your particular course and your group style, but you should be making sure that there is a definite structure to the materials you are producing.
    • Please note that your tendency may be to underestimate the degree of effort/detail I am asking for with this section.  This is a significant amount of work.  Be sure to not only think at the high level outcomes/standards but make sure you begin to break these down further and identify the medium and low level outcomes you expect from students. I am giving you two weeks on this to emphasize how much effort I think this will take.)
    • You may find that this list of verbs tied to Bloom's Taxonomy is helpful in writing your outcomes.

     

  3. Course Assessment (Due Sunday, July 6)
    • Once you have clearly identified all of the outcomes you expect from the course you are designing, you need to identify how you intend to assess whether students are meeting these standards. 
    • Is this assignments, projects, quizzes?  Yes, that is all part of it.  But what, specifically, will a student need to KNOW - or DO - or DEMONSTRATE - to convince you that they have met the outcomes.
    • In my mind I view this as a completely separate set of content from the outcomes.  You need to have a strong grasp on the outcomes before you can attempt to talk about assessment.
    • But I also recognize that there may be benefit in presenting Assessments in parallel with their corresponding Outcomes rather than in series.
    • Therefore, you and your teammates may decide what is the best format to present the material of Outcomes and Assessments.  The only thing I ask is that it is clear to the reader what is what.

     

  4. Course Schedule (Due Sunday, July 13)
    • Create a general schedule that divides the topics, outcomes, and assessments over the length of the course.  Are these four equal units of four weeks each?  Is one topic two weeks and another eight weeks?  What do you anticipate covering, in what order, and for how long?
    • Again, you may use whatever format makes sense for your group's deliverable.  However, it should be clear to an external reader what you are proposing.

    5.  

  5. Creating Learning Activity Descriptions for the Outcomes/Assessments (Due Sunday, July 20)
    • What are the kinds of things that you want students to do to learn the material? Listen to lectures? Watch videos? Complete worksheets? Create projects?
      • It's likely a combination of these.
    • In the previous section you claimed it would take N weeks to get students ready to meet the outcomes/complete the assessments…
      • So this week you get to indicate what you/students are doing for the N weeks and how.
    • The level of detail I am looking for here is medium.
      • I'm looking for a bit more than "2 days of lecture, 1 research activity, 1 game review session, and 1 day for the quiz"
      • But I'm also not looking for full blown lesson plans for EACH of those days mentioned above.
      • What I'm looking for is enough detail that someone reading your materials understands what the lecture/activity/review session is about and could start building it themselves.
    • As you complete this section of the document be sure that you and your teammates are considering the discussion about supportive practices. What kinds of decisions can you make to make all students feel engaged and welcomed?

     

  6. At least two SPECIFIC lesson plans for lectures or in-class activities (Due Sunday, July 27)
    • Divide your group down into two teams.
    • Identify two specific lessons from part 1 that you think would benefit from actually being generated/completely written up.
      • I encourage you, but don't require it, to make them two different STYLES of lessons
    • The format you use for these lesson plans is not prescribed.  I would rather you create something that fits the requirements for one of your school districts than some arbitrary format.
    • BUT, if you don't have an idea of what I am looking for here I am thinking something approaching the way Code.org creates their lessons
    • Again, I want this to be approaching fully usable as it is written.

     

  7. At least one SPECIFIC assessment (Tuesday, August 5)
    • This can be tackled by the entire group or assigned to an individual and edited by the group
    • Identify at least one assessment activity related to what you produced in week 3.  Produce the specific assessment handout you would use with that assessment.
    • Again, you may use whatever format is appropriate for your assessment and course.

     

  8. A "Syllabus Quality" Grading Policy (Tuesday, August 5)
    • Finally, how will you assign final grades in this course?  How will you combine all of the elements that you identified previously (lessons, activities, participation, assessments, etc) for assigning a final letter grade.
    • By "Syllabus Quality" I mean that there should be enough detail in your description that one of your classmates or I could take your grading policy and your gradebook/spreadsheet and assign your final grades.
    • As a reference, consider the section on grading from our course syllabus.  If you saw my gradebook you could use this material to assign grades that match my expectations.
    • You may use whatever format you like for this. You do not need to follow my expectations.  Again, I would rather that you created something that is useful for you and your school district.
    • While I do not REQUIRE you to use elements of equitable grading I strongly encourage you to consider how you would OR at the very least make a conscious team decision that you are not.

     

 

Submitting Project

You will be working on this project most weeks over the course of the entire semester. When you are ready for me to actually grade your project, please have ONE member of your team email me, confirming that the document in your groups folder in the Folder for all Group Projects is complete and ready for grading.

 

Presenting Project

At the final Community of Practice event on Thursday, August 7th, each team will be given approximately 10 minutes to share your project with your peers. The idea is that you may find out that someone else did something that you would like to check out for yourself.

To prepare for this activity, I ask each team to prepare a "4-slide talk" by making their own copy of the talk template (Also provided in the shared group folder link above) and save a copy with their final project.