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Tips on Preliminary Steps:
- Check program audit or curriculum revision
documents to see what is indicated about the course you are about to
develop or revise.
- Meet with your facilitator and begin to
establish a working relationship early in the process.
- Get course development guidelines from
your facilitator. Also, ask him or her for copies of appropriate
exemplary courses.
- Consider who the audiences for your course
document will be: e.g., colleagues, Department Head, the Deans and
Vice-President for Academic Affairs, future instructors, external
constituencies.
- Think about what kinds of processes you
want student taking the course to be engaged in. This will help in
generating activities and assignments for the course, and may affect
which course development model you decide to use.
- Set up a regular appointment with your
facilitator. Settle on a time frame for your project. Plan to write
in stages, if possible, at regular intervals.
Tips on Writing:
- Try to get some words on paper as soon as
possible to begin the process. You need not write the sections in order, in fact, many course developers find it
best to start writing the section(s) which they are more excited.
- Use language for an intelligent but
uninformed lay audience; later, read the draft you have written from
the point of view of a non-expert outsider.
- Avoid highly specialized jargon whenever
possible. For technical terms and acronyms, either provide brief
parenthetical definitions or append a glossary to your document.
- Feedback and revision is a normal part of
the writing process. Expect rewrites.
- Check for consistency with relevant audits
or curriculum documents, guidelines from accreditation groups, the
College's Mission Statement, catalog, and documents for subsequent
courses.
- If you are using the objectives-based
model, make sure the objectives are consistent with the course goals
and are consistent throughout the document.
- Check to see that the other elements
(e.g., catalog description) of your course proposal are consistent
with the rationales and course structure sections.
- Make sure your sample syllabus (or sample
syllabi), including the announced grading system, is consistent with
the rest of your document, for example, the student assessment
section. (Refer syllabus guidelines in the course development
models.)
- Specify how lecture, lab, and
clinical/practicum hours each will be utilized. Check to see that
credit hours are distributed correctly.
Process Tips:
- Keep your Department Chairperson involved
in the process; share an early draft.
- If appropriate, talk with instructors or
writers of prerequisite and subsequent courses to insure curricular
coherence.
- Keep notes from each meeting with your facilitator.
- To avoid possible confusion, label each
revised draft and its corresponding computer file with the correct
date.
- If the course is being developed by a
team, name someone as the lead writer. That person can collate and
edit team contributions into a single draft, copies of which are
shared with the team as the project progresses.
- Review current Library holdings; cite some
or all of these in your document and use this opportunity to
identify important new materials to support the course.
- Study technology needs and opportunities
for the course. The staff in the Academic Computing Department is
available to you as a resource. If your course uses technology to a
significant degree, send your first full draft to Academic Computing
for review.
- Consider ways to incorporate ethical
issues into your course.
- Consider if and how your course could be
offered in a variety of formats
Style Tips:
- Capitalize Library and College when
referring to each one specifically in the course document.
- Refer to classrooms with computers as
computer classrooms not completer labs.
- Do not list required textbooks in your
Library section of the course document.
- Make the determination of the students'
final grades as explicit as possible.
- Use current designations for various
College offices/departments (e.g., Student Academic Computer Center
(SACC); Computer Information Systems (CIS); Library (formally
referred to as the ERC).
- Please paginate your document beginning on
the first page after the title page.
- If your draft is substantial in length,
include a take of contents.
- Please make capitals, terminology, etc.,
consistent throughout the document.
- Underline or italicize the title of books.
- Make sure all resources cited are
up-to-date (e.g., current publication data).
- When discussing other courses in the
document, list the course number and course title.
- Do not isolate a "widow" at the
bottom of a page.
- Provide an abbreviated title for course
(no more than 30 spaces) on your title page.
Download a PDF (24k) file of the General Advice
document 10/19/04: - gl
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