Building a Course

Building a course can seem like a daunting task, but if you follow the process outlined below and start early, you'll create an effective course that your students will enjoy. Remember that in most cases you can draw on previous syllabi and that you can always talk to previous instructors, the GI Coordinator, or the Extended Learning Coordinator if you need advice. See the Contacts page for more information.

If there's any other information you think would be helpful to include on this page, please contact Bruce Dadey, the English TA Coordinator.

Basic Steps

Here are the basic steps to build a course, along with suggestions for how long in advance of the course's start you should start working on each step. See the sections below for more details on each step.

The objectives and outcomes for your course will determine everything else about it: the materials you include, the teaching methods you employ, and the assignments you create.

• Objectives are instructor- or course-focused. They outline what the instructor or the course will do: for example, enhance students' understanding of how social factors influenced the development of Romantic literature, present the three rhetorical appeals and outline how they can be applied, or develop student's understanding of visual rhetoric by having them analyze popular advertisements.
• Outcomes are student-focused. They outline what the student should be able to do, know, or value by the end of the course: for example, students will be able to identify prominent motifs in a poem and relate them to the poem's themes, use techniques of arrangement in an argument essay to effectively guide and persuade an audience, or use layout strategies on a webpage to organize complex information in a way that makes it easy for an audience to understand.

At first you should define objectives and outcomes at the level of the overall course, then define them for each unit in the course, and finally for each lesson.

When creating objectives and outcomes, consider whether they cover a variety of cognitive levels. Bloom's taxonomy is a helpful schema for this: see the CTE page on Bloom's Taxonomy for how you can use the taxonomy to create outcomes and activities that span multiple cognitive levels. Also consider how to effectively integrate your various outcomes and objectives so they represent a systematic development of course concepts and skills.

Clear objectives and outcomes ensure that your course is cohesive and effective, because they make clear to both you and your students what the course is trying to accomplish and why it includes the materials, activities, and assignments it does. Course-level objectives and outcomes should be included in your course syllabus, and explicitly stating the specific objectives and outcomes of a class at the beginning helps students to understand what it is they are meant to learn. Having clear objectives and outcomes will also help you to evaluate the effectiveness of your course or class, since they provide you with a clear idea of what you were intending to accomplish.

See the following Centre for Teaching Excellence teaching tips for more information on objectives and outcomes:

• Aligning Outcomes, Assessments, and Instruction

Course materials can include textbooks, course kits, posted articles or extracts, library reserves, websites, and videos. Your primary consideration when choosing course materials is likely going to be whether the materials help you and your students to achieve the objectives and outcomes of the course. However, consider as well the financial cost of materials--there may be less expensive version of texts, digital or rental options for textbooks, or free Open Education Resource (OER) resources that would work well for your class.

Consider as well accessibility issues: will the resources be usable by all students? For instance, can your PDF readings be read aloud if necessary by a screen reader or other accessibility software? Can students with visual, auditory, or cognitive disabilities access the information in the texts you're ordering? Do the videos you're assigning have transcripts or captioning?

Finally, when using extracts from published works or articles, always keep in mind copyright issues. As the course instructor, you are responsible for ensuring that your course conforms to copyright regulations. See the university's Copyright for Teaching page and especially its Fair Dealing Advisory for guidelines on including previously published material in your course.

Order your course materials early. It usually takes a month for textbooks to be available, and if there are any issues with the availability of your desired materials, then it is easier to solve those problems or explore alternative texts well in advance of when your course begins. Students who enroll early for your course may want to access the materials before the course starts.

Finding and Ordering Textbooks

You can do the following to determine which textbooks might be useful for your course:

• Look at previous syllabi for your course in the English Syllabus Archive.
• Use an online search to find courses with topics that are similar to yours.
• Consult the Open Syllabus Explorer to find commonly ordered texts for courses similar to yours.
• Consult Open Educational Resource (OER) sites to find free texts that could fulfill your course needs.

Before ordering a textbook, see if it's available as an e-Text from the UWaterloo library. In some cases, texts are available as PDF downloads that students can mark up themselves.

Requesting Review Copies

If you are unable to locate a copy of a text to check if it's suitable for a course, you can often obtain a print or digital inspection copy from the text's publisher. In general, you can obtain these copies by either ordering them from a form on the publisher's website or by contacting the publisher's local sales representative.

To find out who you should contact for a review copy, you can either look up the publisher on an online site like Amazon (use the Canadian site if possible, since the publisher might be different in the US) and then look up the text on the publisher's website, or ask the bookstore for the name of the publisher and representative.

Ordering Textbooks

If you've determined that you need to order a textbook, follow these steps:

1. Go to the bookstore's Adoptions site.
2. Log in and follow instructions to place a new adoption.

Notes:

• On the Instructor information page, click I am the instructor to autofill the information.
• On the Book information page, click Search for books used in previous semesters to find books that have been previously used for the course.

Creating a Course Kit

You may want to put together a printed or online course kit that includes extracts and articles. To create a printed or online course kit and have it sold through the bookstore, fill in the W Store's online order form.

Posting Readings

You can also post extracts from works or individual articles directly on your course LEARN site, subject to copyright regulations. See the university's Copyright for Teaching page and especially its Fair Dealing Advisory for guidelines on including previously published material in your course.

Library Reserves

You can also make course readings available through course reserves at the UWaterloo library. Using reserves can be preferable over simply posting articles on your LEARN site because the library ensures persistent links for materials, makes sure materials are digitized legally, and can provide you with statistics on how materials are accessed.

See the library's Course reserves for instructors page for information on how to set up course reserves.

Your assignments should grow out of your course objectives and outcomes: they are an opportunity for students to demonstrate or apply their knowledge and the means by which you assess their performance. See the CTE's Aligning Outcomes, Assessments, and Instruction for suggestions on how to align assignments with intended learning outcomes, and also on how to align assignments with the intended level of performance. Also see Learning Activities and Assignments: How to Maximize Their Effectiveness for guidelines on how to best present assignments and support students as they work on them.

Types of Assignments

Assignments can be formative (assessing progress toward a particular learning outcome) or summative (assessing in a final way how well the outcome has been achieved). Include both types of assignments in your course: low-stakes, low-weight assignments that allow students to test their growing knowledge or to experiment without a significant risk to their grade, and higher-stakes assignments at the end of units or at the end of the course that assess how well students have grasped course concepts and materials.

As the CTE outlines in Assignment Design: Sequencing Assignments, it is most effective if you arrange your assignments so they provide a progressive, stepwise structure for students to absorb course concepts and materials, generally moving from low-stakes to higher stakes assignments. Consider as well if your assignments foster students' development at a variety of different levels in Bloom's Taxonomy. See the CTE's Bloom's Taxonomy Learning Activities and Assessments for example of assignments that work at various cognitive, affective, and psychomotor levels.

Your initial ideas for types of assignments will likely draw on your own experiences as a student. Consider, though, whether the assignment types you are familiar with are the best way of assessing whether your course outcomes and objectives are being achieved. Also consider whether your assignments and activities are presenting students with different levels

See the following CTE tip pages for a broad spectrum of assignment possibilities you might consider:

• Types of Assignments and Tests
• Low-Stakes Writing Assignments

Designing Assignments

Assignments need to be carefully designed in order to ensure that they align with course objectives, assess what they are intended to, and are clearly understood by students. The following CTE tip sheets give guidelines to ensure that your assignments are well-designed:

• Learning Activities and Assignments: How to Maximize Their Effectiveness
• Assignment Design: Checklist
• Effectively communicating assignment tasks

Before You Start

Before you start building your LEARN site, it's a good idea to have a weekly activity schedule prepared, even tentatively, as well as an idea of what kind of course materials you'd like to use.

The instructions below focus on building a basic course using the resources in LEARN, but if you'd like to explore other technological tools you might use to build your course, see IST's Educational Technology Hub for UWaterloo-supported tools and the Keep Learning site's Tools and Technology inventory for other educational technology tools which may not be centrally supported.

Building Your Learn Site

Here are the steps to building a basic course site in LEARN. The links below go to the LEARN help pages that will help you accomplish each task.

You can carry out steps 2-8 directly in your course, or you can use LEARN's Course Builder tool to accomplish each step. You can access the Course Builder by clicking Course Admin in the top LEARN menu and then choosing Course Builder.

1. Request your course shell. One to two months prior to the start of term, IST will send out an email notifying instructors that they are able to request course shells for the following term. To request a course shell, email learnhelp@uwaterloo.ca with your course and section number or go to LEARN tools and go to Courses > Request a course. Note: If you want to base your course on an existing online course that you have access to, you can copy over components from the other course. Otherwise, follow the steps below.
2. Create your modules. You'll likely want to include a syllabus and assignments module and one module for each week.
3. Upload your course files to the appropriate modules. Course files may include a syllabus, assignment descriptions, readings, web links, and lecture files. Note that you can delete or re-order content once you've uploaded it.
   
   Materials can be uploaded in a variety of formats, including PDF, Word, Powerpoint, or jpg and other visual formats. You can also create new files using LEARN's HTML editor. If you want to include your own audio or visual materials you can record yourself with tools on a digital device (computer or phone) either with audio only or audio and video and upload the file. If you want to get fancier, PowerPoint offers the option for voice recording with presentations. If you're not very comfortable with technology, though, it might be best to keep things as simple as possible. All of the files you save from these processes can be uploaded into LEARN for your students to access.
4. Create your marking scheme. You can also just use a spreadsheet for final mark calculations if you’re more comfortable with that. Students will still see the marks for individual assignments even if you don't create a marking scheme.
5. Create dropboxes for assignments.
6. Create discussion forums for your students.
7. Create your quizzes, tests, and exams.
8. Post a Welcome announcement. It can also be helpful to post announcements at the end of each week outlining what students will be doing the following week.

You're ready to go!

Developing Lessons

You can create lesson plans before or during the term, but once you have defined your course objectives and outcomes, created your assignments, and outlined your units and schedule, you are ready to begin creating your lesson plans. Your course outline will likely include topics and readings for individual classes, so you already will have given some thought to the goals and possibly the specific activities that will take place in particular classes.

The activities you include in your lesson plan for a particular class will depend on the goals of the individual class, and those will be determined by the objectives and outcomes of the specific unit in which the class is taking place and of your overall course. Your goals for a class will also depend on what assignments you need to prepare students to undertake.

Creating Accessible Lessons

As with your overall course design, you want the designs of your individual lessons to be accessible, so that students can fully participate regardless of any challenges or disabilities they may have. The CTE's Universal Design: Instructional Strategies provides ways in which you can make your lessons maximally inclusive.

Choosing Learning Activities

There are a broad variety of activities possible in a class. Lecturing is a common activity, but pedagogical research suggests that students benefit most from active learning in which they respond to questions, interact with other students, and have opportunities to apply course tools and concepts. Students will learn less and be less engaged if they are passive listeners for an entire class, so vary the activities and pace in your classes.

See the following Centre for Teaching Excellence pages for information on the process of lesson planning and on choosing effective activities based on your class goals:

• Course Design: Planning a Class describes a variety of activities you can include in your classes and provides sample lesson plan templates.
• Bloom's Taxonomy Learning Activities and Assessments will help you to design assignments that challenge your students at different levels.
• Active Learning Activities describes activities that promote student activity and reflection.
• Online Activities and Assessment for the Flipped classroom describes online activities and assessment methods.
• Activities for large classes presents active learning activities that can be used in large classes.
• Lecturing effectively presents practices for more engaging and productive lectures.
• Nine alternatives to lecturing presents alternatives to the lecture, particularly for larger classes.

In most cases you will receive an email a few months prior to the start of your course with a link to the English Dept. Graduate Instructor Teaching Preferences form. The form asks you for information on preferred teaching times, on preferred buildings you'd like to teach in, and on room characteristics that are necessary for your course (e.g., whiteboard, AV, moveable tables and chairs). Scheduling is a university-wide process, so it's not always possible to accommodate instructor preferences, but they are taken into account when rooms and time slots are assigned.

Once scheduling is complete, you will receive another email informing you about your room and time slot. As soon as you receive your information, make sure that the time slot works for your schedule and go to your assigned room to make sure it's appropriate for your class. You want to check the time slot and room as soon as possible, since it may not be possible to make changes closer to the start date of class.

In order to access the AV facilities of the classroom, you may need a fob. See IST's Electronic classrooms page for information on fobs, microphones, and device connectors.

Before your first class, be sure to familiarize yourself with the podium controls in your room and to test all AV equipment to be sure it is working properly, particularly if you are going to be using your own laptop or if you are using equipment such as a DVD player. Make sure, for instance, that you can project a Powerpoint and that the image and sound from a YouTube video play properly on the room's AV equipment.

Viewing your class roster

You can check your class roster on Quest any time prior to the start of your course. Follow these steps:

1. Go to Quest's Faculty and Staff Sign In page.
2. Click the Faculty and staff sign in to Quest button.
3. Log in with your UWaterloo credentials.
4. Click Class Roster.
5. Click the appropriate term and then course. A list of your students is displayed that includes the students' departments and year levels.
   
   Note that you can download a copy of the class list by clicking the Download button. To download all the information in the class list, choose "I want a *.csv copy of this Class Roster" without the Electronic Grades option, which is used to submit your final marks.

Printing a photo classlist

To help you identify and remember your students, from within LEARN you can download a photo class list which includes the students' names and WatIAM images. Follow these instructions:

1. On your course home page, click Course Admin (upper right of window).
2. Click Widgets.
3. Click on the magnifying glass icon to the right of Course Tools.
4. Click Instructor Tools.
5. Click Photo Class List for all sections.

You're now ready to start your class!

For your first class, it's useful to bring the following: your lesson plan, copies of your syllabus (if you're handing out print copies), a printout or digital copy of your class list, and class textbooks so students know what their texts should look like.

Arrive early so you can set up your AV. You will have checked out the AV prior to the first class, but you want to be sure it's working before the class starts.

There are a number of possible goals for your first class:

• Introducing students to the course: its overall topics and goals, structure, main focuses, texts, and policies.
• Introducing yourself to the students.
• Explaining the general significance of the course's topic subject matter and its possible applicability to the students' academic progress, career possibilities, or personal development.
• Doing ice-breaking exercises that allow students to get to know one another and that establish a positive class dynamic.
• Going over some of the course's main concepts in a very broad way.
• Informally assessing how familiar students already are with the course concepts and tools.

See the Centre for Teaching Excellence's Surviving Your First Day of Class for more suggestions on creating a successful first day of class.