Course Goals
Initial Publication Date: November 30, 2009
Course goals and how faculty members achieve those goals are a common theme in several of the course videos. Here some of the faculty members speak about their goals for their classes and how they structure a course to help their students meet them.
Matt describes how his course design helps students focus on the body's systems and how those systems interact, in the hope that students will begin to think like physiologists.
Carol describes how she encouraged her students to draw upon their prior experience and course-work to inform the material of her course, and how the one of the goals of the course was to integrate curriculum and curating.
Clara discusses the importance of teaching students the process of reading disparate texts from antiquity in a deeper context and how she helps students connect discussions from class to class.
Christine describes the overall goals of her introductory language course and the challenges of balancing different elements language and culture and the "shape" a typical class might take. The rapidity of coverage of material is a challenge.
Bill talks about the variety of interests that students bring to his course, and the course goals of close reading and the uses and problems of historical evidence for the medieval period.
Deanna talks about working with low-confidence students and showing them a variety of topics in mathematics so that they see how the overall discipline operates. She also talks about the importance of beginning a class with brief review.
Greg describes the different elements in his methods course, structured around a series of workshops, and the challenges of integrating all the different modules into a coherent whole for an audience with a diverse set of interests. This course focuses on an ongoing research project about the national elections, which Greg describes.
Arjendu describes the challenges of teaching Newtonian physics and the no-lecture approach he has developed for helping students manage the material, replacing lectures with in-class problem solving.