Category Archives: Mass Communication Teaching (MMC 6930)

Developing a college course: You’re part of a big picture of curriculum procedures and accrediting standards

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When you develop a course syllabus, you are part of a much bigger process that includes your own department’s curriculum, the university’s curriculum guidelines, and accrediting standards.

At the University of Florida, every college is required to develop measureable student learning outcomes (SLOs) and to collect data on every student in the college. This new requirement is due to an upcoming accrediting assessment of UF in 2014 by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Faculty are to use the student results of the assessment of the SLOs to evaluate and improve teaching and learning.

As a college, we also have accrediting standards from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (ACEJMC), the accrediting component of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Communications programs are evaluated on nine accrediting standards. Standard 2 is Curriculum and Instruction.

Take a quick read though Standard 2 — professional values and competencies and the indicators for assessment — and consider those factors in relation to the course that you would like to teach.

The curriculum of communications programs has become a hot topic of discussion in the last couple of years. Programs are grappling with how to respond to the changes going on in the media industry. Some say that time spent on teaching hardware and software takes away from teaching the fundamentals. Others say that the changes in the media industry have changed what the fundamentals are.

Read An Open Letter to America’s University Presidents that was written by the leaders of six major grant-awarding foundations that have been funders of initiatives in communications and higher education. The letter was published Aug. 3, 2012, and has caused some lively debate.

Also read “Not So Fast,” one of the many responses countering the letter.

Develop proposal for undergraduate course you want to develop

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New teaching assistants and new faculty members often start learning about the values of and problems of a syllabus when they are handed a syllabus and told, “Here’s what you’ll be teaching.”

Sometimes that’s literal — As a teaching assistant, you are given a syllabus and that’s what you are to follow. Having the syllabus already prepared can save you from making literally dozens of decisions about the course.

Sometimes you are given the syllabus to serve as a foundation for the syllabus that you will be developing for the course.
You want to be able to develop your own syllabus — recognizing how your course fits into the curriculum and bringing your own strengths to the course.

As part of your teaching portfolio, you are developing course materials for an undergraduate communications course — the syllabus, an assessment activity and evaluation criteria, and two lesson plans.

You’ve already been thinking about what course you’d like to develop. What you need to do for class for Sept. 17 is to develop a written proposal for your course. Here’s a Word document that provides a structure for your proposal — mmc6930_course_proposal
Download the form, type in the needed information, and bring the printed proposal to class on Sept. 17.

Once you have the course determined and the proposal written, you can begin thinking about planning your syllabus:

  • Identify syllabi online for similar courses.
  • Answer the questions (above — in image) about how a syllabus can help your students and help you.
  • Check the links I’ve provided on the blog (UF resources) for information that you will include in your syllabus.
  • Read the chapter in McKeachie’s Teaching Tips about developing a syllabus.
  • Read a post I wrote about creating a syllabus.
  • Develop a list of questions you have about creating a syllabus.

‘Rebooting the Academy’ — How could innovations impact you teaching in higher education?

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I hope that reading “Rebooting the academy: 12 tech innovators who are transforming campuses” is encouraging you to think about some of the traditional approaches of higher education and how some of those approaches could/should be changed.

I’m asking you to write a five-page paper responding to the book as a graduate student who is considering a career teaching in higher education (syllabus, p. 4). You’re writing your response to me but can consider your audience to be both graduate students planning a career in high education and those teaching in higher education. So we have a level of awareness about higher education teaching, learning, policies and politics.

As you read the book, you’ll see that the 12 innovators discuss a wide range of higher education issues. Some of those topics include:

  • Rethinking the traditional 50-minute teaching format to becoming 10-minute video instruction on a specific topic.
  • Making textbooks more affordable by having universities work out purchasing contracts for digital books.
  • Making college more affordable with online courses
  • Incorporating the technology students have (cellphones) into teaching and learning
  • Changing the academic publication cycle

You may want to comment on the book overall or selected articles. Writing in first person is appropriate. Remember that the emphasis is to be on the book itself. Your written response should not become your personal commentary on higher education.

One possible approach for your response paper is to look at the book from the perspective of our conversation in class about goals for the course. Many of the topics raised in our class discussion are addressed by the “Rebooting” innovators. How would their innovations affect you as a graduate teaching assistant and/or a college faculty member?

Here is the list of the topics you identified that you considered important issues for the discussion of teaching and learning:

  • Integrating technology use
  • Promoting professional development
  • Dealing with diversity
  • Teaching differences between lecture and hands-on teaching
  • Teaching compensation
  • Classroom management – Controlling your classroom
  • Pacing of instruction – Realizing that students may be learning at different rates.
  • How flexible should teachers be – responding to student issues
  • Evaluation – Different ways to evaluate student performance
  • Keeping the class current – especially as assigned texts may not be up to date
  • Teaching outside of your specialty
  • How to approach difficult content
  • How to deal with different classroom environments
  • How to develop curriculum
  • How to manage classroom expectations
  • How to grade fairly – and be able to finish on time
  • Engaging students in class
  • Engaging student in critical thinking
  • Bringing technology to the classroom
  • Keeping the classroom fresh
  • Balancing goals of curriculum with student needs and interests

In our next class meeting, each of you will be a one-minuter presenter on one of the “Rebooting” innovators. Your objectives are to provide the class with a reminder of the person and what his/her innovation is and then to pose a question to start a discussion of the implications of the innovation for teaching in higher education.

Use first-class activities to get to know your students and their goals

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Before class met yesterday, the 14 students in Mass Communication Teaching were names on a roster. I knew only one of them.

By the end of class, not only did I have a face to go with every name but I knew some important information about each student, including his/her previous teaching and work experience and educational background. Getting to know the class members can be accomplished by having students fill out an information sheet (paper or digital) or by having student share information in class introductions. As this is a small class, we could have the individual sharing.

In a small-group activity, each group was asked to develop a list of key issues related to teaching in higher education. The four teams’ lists are pictured above. We used the lists to begin our semester-long discussion about teaching issues, from motivating students to being fair in grading to figuring out how to use technology effectively.

This small group activity accomplished several objectives:

  • The students had the opportunity to get to know the other members of their group. Most of the students are in their first semester of graduate school, so they didn’t know each other.
  • The activity helped provide variety in a three-hour class time block.
  • Everyone had the opportunity to share ideas. Even though a class of 14 is a small class, time would not have allowed everyone to have had the opportunity to talk if we had stayed as a large group.
  • I was able to see what some of their concerns are as teachers and can address those issues during the semester.