FEP: Self Examination of Teaching – ENG101/ENG102 Course Shells/Guides

To complete an FEP each faculty member must engage in a self-examination of “THREE REQUIRED AREAS”:

• TEACHING (OR OTHER PRIMARY DUTIES).  For example, instructional or service delivery, content expertise, classroom or program management, instruction/program design.

This is the first of my three required areas for self-examination. Teaching. I will focus on content expertise. I’ve been teaching online for 14 years, so I’ve become somewhat of an expert in online course development. One of the good things about becoming involved with online teaching is it brings me back to the basics of teaching and learning and course design. What I mean by that is that so much scrutiny has been placed on online teaching and online classes. For instance, in order to teach online, one must be properly trained in Quality Matters standards and have a course review after their course is developed. This is not expected of any other instructor teaching at the college, only online instructors. As a result I’ve been able to master instructional design and online course development. One of the projects I’ve been working on since transferring over to GCC is building ENG101 and ENG102 course shells and teaching guides for adjunct instructors. The course shells have been a work in progress for several years now, but the gist of the project is to make available full courses for adjuncts to use as guides for teaching their own courses.

The course shells and teaching guides include full syllabi and full course modules with included assignments, readings, class activities, and quizzes. The course shells can be used in whole or in part depending on what the instructors need. When I designed the courses, I used my knowledge of instructional design for online, hybrid and face-to-face instruction, so no matter what the mode an instructor may teach, the course shells will be a good place to start.

One key concept of designing good online classes is modularization. You can read more about how A Modular Course Design Benefits Online Instructors and Students. I figured if it works for online, why wouldn’t it work for face-to-face classes as well. So I designed the course shells using modules that incorporate the same types of components in each course module. Faculty could then pick and choose which modules they wanted to use. Modules were developed around a 3-4 week period. In the ENG101 each module included 2 assignments, handbook activity (grammar practice), journal posts, discussion forum, an essay and a module quiz. Have a look at the complete modules overview page for ENG101. Below is a screenshot of Module II from the fall semester.

The course shells were designed in Word documents as well as placed in a Blackboard course shell and shared with both full-time and adjunct faculty in the department. So if someone wanted to use the course management system if was already set up and organized for him/her. We currently have 22 people who have access to the Blackboard course shell. This semester I spend considerable time converting the Bb course shells over to  Canvas. ENG102 is ready, but I’m still working on ENG101. With the move to Canvas, I’ve been working on rewriting/writing better learning objectives for both courses.