Overview of a Biology Degree
Biology as a domain can no longer remain siloed off from other bodies of knowledge without risking underserving or alienating our future students. While new majors have emerged to seemingly integrate the study of life with specialized skills or concepts (e.g. bioengineering, computational biology, science and society), all of these represent further fracturing of biology as a discipline rather than bringing together critical components that future biologists need to thrive and serve their communities.
This reimagining of a biology major aims to re-integrate human connection and the role of social justice in science, while also preparing students to engage in challenging problem-solving scenarios that draw on quantitative and/or computational skillsets. By de-prioritizing traditional course line-ups in biology (e.g. biochemistry, genetics, developmental biology), students will instead navigate the major by exploring critical issues that relate to biology and require an understanding of concepts and skills set forth in Vision and Change to effectively address. Through both student choice and shared fundamental competencies, students in this biology major should be prepared for entering biotech, government/non-profits, graduate research, health careers, or any other career of choice.Back to product overview »
Design Philosophy
The program will be underpinned by a spirit of open pedagogy and multimodal teaching and learning where all students and faculty co-create and publish new ideas, visions, and imaginings on how biological frameworks can shape areas of human society previously thought to be purely managed by other disciplines. The program's hidden curriculum will develop student agency, self-efficacy, and innovation mindset through the principles of open pedagogy and multimodal learning. Through this system of openness and choice, the program will host and maintain a website containing the body of knowledge produced from coursework that can be openly shared to benefit those willing to consume it, and also encourage students and faculty to publish their work by furnishing writing and editorial support. This repository will be ultimately hosted and moderated by the department as evidence of the work that they produce in collaboration with faculty, staff, and students.
Program-level Learning Goals
This program takes a more holistic view of educating students for their future work and civic experiences. Students can be encouraged to identify and value their own strengths. Faculty can motivate students to use those strengths to demonstrate their ability to contribute to collaborative problem-solving in the workplace.
Students in this biology program will be able to:
- locate, interpret, and evaluate scientific information
- analyze biological data through visualization, statistics, or data science
- make inferences and solve problems using models and simulations
- elicit, listen to, and incorporate ideas from teammates with different perspectives and backgrounds
- demonstrate the ability to critically analyze ethical issues in the conduct of science
- recognize the impacts of science on a local and global scale
Connection with Foundational Knowledge
Digital/ICT Literacy
Students will need to demonstrate their ability to interact with multiple forms of information and technologies either to learn what is already known in a field, find where problems exist, and develop and present their solutions. Computers and computer-associated skills are featured in numerous linker courses, but basic searching of the scientific literature and discerning good sound studies will be critical in all core courses.
Core Content
Core content is a simplified notion in biology as biology operates in many levels of scope and complexity. Vision and Change specifically calls out the following ideas: transformation of energy and matter, systems, information flow, structure function, and evolution. However, each of these can be interpreted in multiple lenses (e.g. systems of molecules, cells, organisms, populations, abiotic and biotic factors). Students will certainly engage in all core tenets of Vision and Change, but will have freedom to experience (or even specialize) in different areas. No biologist is a master of all areas at all levels of scales and through all lenses when they graduate from a degree program. Rather they have a working understanding of each that they can transfer to new areas when they must self-learn. We always confront new ideas in biology.
Cross-Disciplinary Knowledge
All courses strive to avoid single department and/or discipline silos. The goal is to encourage faculty and students from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to participate. This integration could be accomplished within the institution, or could bring in guest speakers/teachers outside of the institution (e.g. policy makers, social workers, nurses, investors).
Connection with Meta Knowledge
Creativity & Innovation
These course address unsolved problems and unmet needs. There are objectively no correct answers for students. Creativity and innovation are constantly required and encouraged with formative assessments and grading that does not punish failure. In fact, we should encourage students to be bold and give them chances to recover from failure without fear of how it will affect their grades.
Problem Solving & Critical Thinking
Students will always engage in a project around some fundamental question or need area. For example, students will not just need to learn what we know about sleep so far: they might engage in a research project to understand why some people don't need to sleep as much, or they might design a project to support those afflicted with sleep apnea who lack the resources for a CPAP machine. These courses avoid cookie cutter labs where the answers are known, but instead challenge students to find unsolved problems in the world that they care to pursue and think about how they impact people and society.
Communication & Collaboration
The inherent team-based or learning-community-based nature of courses and the fact that all questions/problems are addressed with the audience who is impacted in mind means that both collaboration and public communication are critical. Constant project milestones (e.g. check-ins, write-ups, presentations) as formative assessment provide multiple opportunities to practice. A final learning showcase or portfolio can communicate students' insights to the institutional community or the larger public if we invite the local community and industry experts.
Connection with Humanistic Knowledge
Life/Job Skills
Students will be consistently engaged in building and refining their own portfolios and showing evidence of their growth as a student. This evolving body of work is much more reflective of how individuals are assessed in their careers. The emphasis of these courses where students adapt to new scenarios and must demonstrate their learning in open-ended ways is more reflective of the workplace. Perseverance in the face of failure is a key life skill and is best fostered through guided and supported failure experiences where students can contextualize what is happening and not interpret themselves as failures. Accomplishing this requires close mentoring and team cohesiveness.
Ethical/Emotional Awareness
Students will be able to work in teams and think about ethical impacts. The inherent structuring of all courses around team projects and learning communities will encourage constant social/emotional awareness. Time will be dedicated to team/self-reflection and conversations on purely management/interpersonal issues. Ethical thinking is also key and will be necessary
Cultural Competence
Where cultural competence is defined as "the ability to understand, communicate with and effectively interact with people across cultures," we must examine where students will interact with people across cultures. Being able to practice this skill rests on the assumption that by design, we are bringing in and retaining diverse students and faculty who express humility in learning from one another (without placing the burden of education on any one identity group). While courses can be designed to be less Western-centric (i.e. decolonizing the syllabus) and incorporate case studies/project areas/voices from outside the usual canon, a lot of responsibility also falls on the institution as a whole (not the design of the program) to foster cultural humility.
Program-level Assessments
Some of the easier (i.e. low requirement for human hours) mechanisms for tracking data and conducting assessments will be reviewed continuously, such as at least once per year if not more often. Other aspects that require significant time investment will be conducted on an alternating basis. For example, senior portfolio reviews will be integral to the graduating cohort and surveys can be largely automated in distribution and analysis once it is well-designed so review of these should occur each year.
Specific competency assessments and focus groups take much more time to administer and can be done every 2-3 years on a staggered schedule so that no one aspect of assessment is neglected for several years in a row. The faculty will be integral members of this process though some staffing roles should also be responsible for the organization and execution of these assessment efforts.
Students' Growth as Individuals in Program
Senior Portfolios
Once students declare interest in the program or register for a Biology department course with an intent to major, the department will create a portfolio space for the student. This virtual space gives a clear way that students can back up their work to the cloud, but also provides the infrastructure by which they can share their work with their advisors and with the department review committee when they petition to graduate.
In this space, students will upload evidence of their major projects from core courses they have taken. This evidence could be the entire project if reasonable (e.g. a single video or audio file for a podcast, a slideshow) or could be materials that try to capture an experience (e.g. photos of the physical museum exhibit alongside the stand-out elements). Students will also be asked to include reflections and meta-commentary around each uploaded project. A major theme/part of the prompt in these reflections will be growth, where students address how these projects contributed to their learning and evidence new skills/competencies they are beginning to master.
Portfolios will be a feature of the student's ongoing conversation with the advisor. When they meet quarterly to review the student's choice of courses and overall academic/professional goals, the pair will review the portfolio and determine if there are areas the student can work on and the opportunities that address those areas.
When students are petitioning to graduate with the Biology degree, they will take the final linker course Senior Portfolio to prepare for the portfolio review. In this learning community, students in their last few terms of the program will meet to review their entire portfolio and accumulated work to prepare a final portfolio to present to the Biology department review committee. With the help of their peers, students will identify their 3-4 strongest projects across their entire degree program and their 1-2 weakest projects. Over the term, students will utilize the linker course as an opportunity to craft their narrative that summarizes their overall learning in the program citing their projects as evidence. To showcase how they have grown, students will also tackle their 1-2 weakest projects and revise these past projects, receiving guidance and feedback from peers. The revised projects will be accompanied with commentary that identifies weaknesses, explains the choices to revise, and argues how it evidences the ways in which the student has grown.
Submitted senior portfolios will be reviewed by the student's advisor, as well as two other faculty members and a student peer chosen randomly. Approval of these portfolios using a provided rubric is required to graduate.
Competency Assessments and Concept Inventories
The aim of this entire institutional reimagining is to elevate intangible and often more difficult to assess goals over content goals that are easier to grade and quantify in numbers. However, the department may consider assessing whether students are still getting the core concepts from Vision and Change using either open-ended assessments graded with a rubric or using concept inventories. All of these will be administered for program-level assessment purposes and will not affect students' grades in any way.
Individual Wellbeing and Satisfaction in Program
Surveys
As part of the larger institutional initiative, random samples of individuals at all levels (e.g. student, staff, faculty) will be identified in the department to participate in a survey on their own wellbeing and satisfaction. Wellbeing is described in multiple dimensions and can be at least approximated using validated, close-ended survey instruments.
In particular, questions partially might address key areas:
- Do individuals in the Biology department feel deeply satisfied and enriched by their work (whether that be their studies, their research/teaching, their administrative duties)?
- Do individuals feel like they have the opportunities to express themselves and showcase their strengths in the Biology department?
- Do individuals feel meaningfully connected with others through peer, mentoring, managerial relationships in the Biology department?
- Do individuals in the Biology department feel able to cope with failure and overcome barriers?
- Do individuals feel that they are on track for achieving their purpose through their involvement in the Biology department?
It is critical that we use this data to identify areas of weakness in the department to re-orient practice and shape future decisions. For example, revealing that there is starkly low self-reporting of meaningful connections or satisfaction with work, or that the numbers differ among groups, should guide departmental conversations and planning for the subsequent year.
Exit Interviews and Career Tracing
As part of ongoing assessment efforts, a sample of graduating seniors will be asked to participate in an exit interview. Sufficient numbers should be recruited to participate if there is not enough staffing to support interviewing every single senior that graduates in a cohort. These interviews will be conducted with someone ideally in a role that does not hold power/influence over the student so that the student can speak freely. Questions might include:
- Which aspects of the Biology degree program contributed the most to your learning and growth? Which aspects contributed the least?
- How did your time in the Biology department contribute to your professional goals? What was missing?
- Did you feel that your unique strengths and background was recognized and value in the Biology department? Why or why not?
- Describe any interpersonal relationships (e.g. peers, mentoring, advising) that supported you during your time in the Biology department.
Career tracing will consist of a combination of quick surveys sent to alumni and where responses are missing, using website searching on sites like LinkedIn to identify where alumni end up in the professional world.
Focus Groups and Town Halls
To get answers to questions like those in the survey, but in a much more qualitative and constructive way, themed focus groups and town halls will be conducted at intervals to gather this data. For example, a diverse group of students (not just seniors) could be recruited to comment on how core courses in the degree program support their wellbeing and satisfaction as defined above. Alternatively the focus group could discuss overall departmental climate and peer/faculty relationships. Town Halls can be a much larger venue to gather the entire student body rather than small subsamples, but also would not support as much rigor in analysis.
Program-level Diversity
On the Student Level
Data should be collected and rigorously examined to ensure there is representative diversity (at least matching that of the population the institution aims to serve, i.e. the US population demographics) in all areas. The Biology department is accountable for identifying and addressing any inequities shown in the following areas:
- which students are taking different Biology courses
- which students declare a major in Biology
- which students pass/drop/fail courses in Biology
- which students leave the Biology major
- which students perform best (according to traditional metrics of GPA) in Biology
On the Staff Level
Same as above regarding students, but instead addressing staff level concerns such as:
- who is being hired for different roles
- who is being compensated more or less
- who is being recognized using institutional or departmental awards
- who is receiving more or less perks
- who is being promoted
- who is in leadership roles
On the Faculty Level
Same as above regarding students, but instead addressing faculty level concerns such as:
- who are faculty members in the Biology department
- which faculty members are at different levels of status and promotion (i.e. tenure)
- which faculty members are getting assigned more or less service responsibilities
- which faculty members are getting assigned more or less teaching responsibilities
- which faculty members are getting more institutional/departmental support
- who is being interviewed for faculty positions in Biology
- who is being hired for new faculty positions in Biology
Equity in Program-level Opportunities
Office Record-Keeping
As a department, it is very likely that there have been note-taking on certain involvements, including but not limited to: which individuals are involved in institutional or departmental committees, who are leaders of student groups or faculty initiatives, who is awarded internal grants or positions, who engages in different projects (e.g. research internships for students), how are people recognized and compensated for what they do. The important thing here is to ensure that no record-keeping tasks fall through the task and that the data is brought together to be studied systematically.
This effort runs in parallel with the initiative described above to examine diversity of individuals in the program. However, rather than the typical numbers that are usually collected in an HR/compliance, these numbers try to capture extra-curricular, co-curricular, or "perks" provided to some individuals but that may not be available or utilized equally by everyone in the department.
Surveys
Surveys that are regularly distributed to students could include a list of extra-curricular or co-curricular opportunities that are available in the department and ask students to mark each item as:
- I was not aware of this opportunity.
- I was aware of this opportunity, but did not attempt to use it.
- I was aware of this opportunity, but was unable to use it.
- I used this opportunity.
Analogous work can be done with staff and faculty surveys.
Exit Interviews
The framework for conducting exit interviews is described above. To serve evaluation in this area, graduating students will be also asked additional questions such as:
- Which opportunities (list examples here or provide a list) did you take advantage of in the Biology department? Which did you not use?
- Describe why you did not use certain opportunities in the Biology department.
Courses and Sequencing
The biology department to settle on the year-round calendar of their core and linker course offerings and have students enroll based on ranking their choices for the entire year. We will implement some fair ranking/matching system so that most students at least sometimes get their favorite classes. Students must take a certain number of Core Courses and Linker Courses to complete the degree, but no single class of those mentioned below would be required. Year-to-year, depending on how many courses there are and whether new ones form, there might be a specific course that isn't offered in a given year. However, the hope is that within the scope of an approximately two year major, students will be able to eventually take most of the courses that interest them. The expected full-time course load might be 2-3 core courses and 1-3 linker courses during a given term (quarter or semester). Ideally students could request, propose, or design either core or linker courses based on interests.
Courses, especially core courses, would be team-taught by faculty and instructors, but they also connect their students as needed to other members of the institutional community and/or local community. Courses should employ revolutionary forms of grading like contract grading, mastery or specifications grading. The final assessment for this program could be based on evaluating the senior portfolio. A final core or linker course could be offered to seniors to help put portfolio together and revise some of the weaker pieces (by revisiting old projects from past courses).
Core Courses
Core courses are 3-4 unit courses in the major offered in a rotating selection and need not be taken in any specific order. These team-based project courses aim to support students as they add to their ongoing portfolio of work during their time in the Biology major. We will encourage students to take projects and move them to summer research projects or activism projects, volunteering especially over breaks or part-time. As soon as students enter the major, the program will create a portfolio that follows them and is used in conversations with advisors on career/academic choices. In these courses, students from other disciplines will be encouraged to join (e.g. humanities, social sciences, other natural or physical sciences, engineering).
Core courses will be broken into short modules addressing the problem from a different angle or disciplinary lens or level of scale. Each module engages in short team-based projects where students make choices and design together. Courses will be supplemented by a core set of existing bite-sized videos (e.g. touching on concepts of signaling, inheritance, cell division, population dynamics, food webs) that support just-in-time learning. All courses must embrace and only use bite-sized OER materials (since no singular textbook will addresses the scope or flexibility of course content). We will also recognize and celebrate student work either through ongoing learning showcases or traditional publications. Projects and resources created by students would then become materials for the next cohort.
Examples include: Cancer, Hunger, Aging, Climate Change, Pandemics, Life in Space, Consciousness, Pain, Designing Humans, Sleep, Energy, Pregnancy and Childbirth, Life Origins, Water, Athletic Ability
Linker Courses
Linker courses (LCs, also stands for learning communities) are 1-2 unit courses intended to act as little communities of practice for students to bring tasks they are working on in the core course. This "bringing tasks" might look like a student preparing for a team presentation in the Hunger course or analyzing data they collected as part of their project in the Pandemics course. The work effort in the linker courses (e.g. "homework problems") are entirely based on students bringing stuff from outside the class and solving/getting help on solving these during the linker course. The Significance and Uncertainty linker course would then not be about doing a traditional statistics class covering the textbook from cover to cover, but rather consulting with an instructor and each other on statistics as they work through projects in the other biology courses they are taking.
The program could give examples of series of linker courses that connect with future goals/careers (e.g. community engagement => public health, project management => biotech, automation => biology start-up), but no specific order or course is required. LCs are a matter of choice and students choosing which from the set to take based on their interest. It is another question whether they take what they are strong in vs. where they want to develop. The set of all linker courses offered in Biology would be more than they are required to take so they would not have to take each one. Students could take a linker course again depending on the pedagogy of that course to allow for "re-takeability." Note that certain areas are not included as linker courses (e.g. ethical thinking, teamwork) because they are essential and should be integrated throughout all core courses.
Examples include:
- Significance and Uncertainty, Data Visualizations, Prediction and Correlation, Modeling Equations, Automation, Signal and Noise, Devices and Hardware
- Scientific Writing, Public Communication, Oral Communication, Visual Communication, Teaching, Science in Media, Web Interfaces
- Project Management, Leadership and Mentoring, Professional Development, Design Thinking, Community Engagement, Budgets and Constraints, Public Policy
- Senior Portfolio
Example Degree Paths
"Traditional Student" Path:
Year 1:
General education requirements, e.g. math, chemistry, biology, writing, humanities, social sciences
Year 2:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| General education requirements | Life Origins | Hunger |
| --- | Public Policy | Project Management |
| --- | General education requirements | Course in another department |
Year 3:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Climate Change | Pandemics | Cancer |
| Sleep | Energy | Aging |
| Design Thinking | Prediction and Correlation | Community Engagement |
| Course in another department | General education requirements | Significance and Uncertainty |
Year 4:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Better Humans | Consciousness | Pandemics* |
| Visual Communication | Professional Development | Leadership |
| Data Visualizations | Scientific Writing | Senior Portfolio |
| Modeling Equations* | Automation | Course in another department |
*retake for additional learning or different focus, or take as a student leader (learning assistant) to guide new students
Department Course Totals: 11 core courses, 15 linker courses (26 courses total)
Unit Count (not counting any GE courses): 11 x 4 + 15 x 2 = 74 units
"Nontraditional Student" Path:
Year 1:
General education requirements, e.g. math, chemistry, biology, writing, humanities, social sciences on a part-time basis
Year 2:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Cancer | Pain | Scientific Writing |
| General education requirement | Visual Communication | General education requirement |
Year 3:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Life in Space | Water | Science in Media |
| General education requirement | Public Policy | General education requirement |
| --- | Course in another department | --- |
Year 4:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Sleep | Pandemics | Consciousness |
| Oral Communication | General education requirement | Design Thinking |
| --- | --- | Course in another department |
Year 5:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Better Humans | Pregnancy and Childbirth | Energy |
| Teaching | Community Engagement | Public Communication |
| Course in another department | --- | --- |
Year 6:
| Fall Quarter | Winter Quarter | Spring Quarter |
| Life Origins | Aging | Leadership and Mentoring |
| Budgets and Constraints | Project Management | Senior Portfolio |
| --- | Course in another department | --- |
Department Course Totals:12 core courses, 13 linker courses (25 courses total)
Unit Count (not counting any GE courses):12 x 4 + 13 x 2 = 74 units
Reflections on Implementation
In drafting this example of a Biology degree, we aim to be aspirational and inspirational. We recognize that we present what may be such a grand divergence from the way departments have historically operated. However, we do have a few ideas for how this program may be implemented more gradually.
Demands on Instructor Time
In response to this proposed curriculum, one might wonder how these changes will affect instructor workloads. We argue that instructor time already varies immensely between instructors of different disciplines, regular course load, status, and institution types. Everyone has different priorities and the baseline expectations of a course in this model will likely not be higher than those of a course assigned to someone who is a full-time lecturer/teaching faculty. Meanwhile, those whose main association with a course is to show up and present at biweekly lectures and who is uninvolved in course design, creation of assessments, or grading, will inevitably find this model to require more work. Depending on institutional context, this model may be a bigger or smaller ask.
Course Preparation
What does it look like to prepare for one of these courses? These courses are less oriented around a single "canon" that covers each subject matter and involves a set of facts and concepts. Rather, all courses practice several key skills in the life sciences and draw on lots of sub-disciplines since biology is such a wide encompassing discipline. It is not expected that instructors know everything about their course, e.g. Sleep or Cancer from every angle. The culture of the department and its instructors should establish that expertise is not required and that "studying up" when preparing for a course is not a necessary or encouraged use of instructor time.
Instead, the instructional team should meet to review past course products (e.g. what were some aspects of what is known in each field, how they are known, and some unanswered questions) from students and past instructors. Instructors should also continue to familiarize themselves with the general model of all core courses (i.e. how they engage students in literature review or design of a scientific study) and that can transfer readily between course assignments.
The content knowledge is these proposed core courses are expected to be covered by a mixture of individual and small-group conversations with faculty and peers, connections to other experts, or pointing to a resource stored in a repository of just-in-time learning resources (i.e. JITT materials) that are built out every year. Populating this repository will take time to build out fully. The department can also choose to award stipend or course release for instructors (e.g. faculty, lecturers, outstanding students) who devote time to developing additional resources (e.g. finding or creating readings, videos, podcasts) as a way to build tools for everyone's benefit.
The culture of sharing teaching materials can vary widely between individuals, single courses, departments, and institutions. Establishing a more open culture is key to supporting instructors such that they share, reuse, innovate, and re-share. Thus, the department should hold crucial conversations during open faculty meetings and/or faculty retreats and establish guidelines for sharing. By involving all instructors, the group can determine how to protect against downsides or penalties for sharing, or how to create reward and recognition for sharing that then addresses everyone's concerns and needs.
Synchronous Course Time
Course time will still be based on the same system of assigning units, but instead the time will be used for very different formats of teaching more akin to tutoring and active learning. Thus, the overall hours will look the same for instructors with the exception of some additional time given to larger teaching team meetings (see the subsection on Coordination below).
On a regular basis, the activities of a teaching instructor might look differently as follows:
| Instruction Model | Monday (Class 1) | Tuesday | Wednesday (Class 2) | Thursday | Friday |
| Lecture-Based Intro Course | Give 50 min lecture on course concepts (e.g. Mendelian genetics principles) with some time dedicated to Q&A | Create or revise slides, prep and rehearse lecture for Wednesday | Similar to Monday | Revise slides and rehearse lecture for next week based on how much content was covered | Grade problem sets and/or work on designing the next exam |
| Active Learning Intro Course | Give 20 min mini-lecture (e.g. Mendelian genetics) with time for 15-20 min group activity (e.g. solving different pedigrees and Punnett squares) followed by whole class debrief and a small group discussion | Create or revise slides, prep and rehearse mini-lecture for Wednesday, create or revise handout for group activity | Similar to Monday | Revise in-class activities for next week based on student learning and obstacles | Read student reflections and provide comments, grade problem sets |
| Core Course in Curriculum | Give 5-10 min of announcements and describing upcoming milestones, allow 15-20 min of team project work with faculty checking in, whole class discussion of confusing concepts or barriers | Respond to student team questions and post links to related JITT resources, schedule feedback | Give 5 min of updates, break into meta-groups with student teams and do peer review of project milestones for 15-20 min, engage in chalk talks on team projects | Meet with teaching team to debrief the week, talk about team project concerns, and plan for next week | Review assigned team project milestones using rubric and send rubric comments with links to resources to teams |
See the below section on ideas for implementation around grading, another element that tends to take a substantial amount of instructor time.
Coordination
A key challenge here is coordinating with the members of the instructional team (e.g. faculty, teaching assistants or TAs, peer mentors) and all "moving parts" in this system. One way this challenge could be addressed is by creating shorter, modular units in advance that are shared department-wide and can be a starting point that provides structure for all planning (i.e. who will do what). Moreover, one key expectation of all instructors will be a weekly teaching team meeting to review how the week is going and what will happen in the next week.
Another way to address this challenge will be explicit structure of roles that are created at the department level and used across all courses. This measure might include appointing a lead faculty member who is a point contact for the department and at larger faculty meetings, and appointing a lead TA or peer mentor who represents that team in some conversations with faculty.
Systems of Grading
New grading systems could best support this new system and tie into much existing research that suggests that using external factors such as grades actually diminishes intrinsic student motivation to learn. We propose departments that move towards this curricular model might consider labor-based grading contracts, specifications grading, mastery grading, or abolishment of course-level grading altogether.
One example of implementation using labor-based contract grading could establish that every major team-based project milestone is either a Credit/No Credit/Not Yet where Not Yet means they are close and must revise to then receive credit. Each item could then be assessed using a rubric that is developed per assignment and inherited between course iterations.
This manifesto and this example best aligns with models where there is no single grade at the end of a course. Each assignment could be tagged based on where students are supported in learning a particular competency, engaged in practice of this competency, and assessed on this competency. Scores could then be given to a set of competencies within a course for each student rather than a single student grade on the course itself. This system is a much more complicated grading scheme at the registrar's level, but there are lots of established computer systems that do this well already and could be modified for such a task.
One key benefit fo these changes in grading systems are that they can be lower effort/time spent on the particulars of percentages or points, and all time spent on grading feeds in naturally to feedback. Arguing between a 91% or a 93% is no longer a time sink. Instead, the instructional team works together to assign reviewers to each project and create feedback sheets for each student team. In this way, much of the work resembles that of a grant review session or other types of faculty work at certain institutions.
Pedagogical Training
The pedagogical training to prepare faculty to offer these courses may seem substantial but it helps to partner with other experts around the institution and to ease faculty into new practices over time. Here are a couple areas that are relevant:
- active learning
- using rubrics
- coaching models of instruction
- backwards design
- interdisciplinary teaching
- metacognitive practices
For example, one would need to model for faculty how they can make courses more modular in order to support broken down outcomes such as learning objectives from larger learning goals. Many experts in these areas can be identified in different institutions, whether that be a Center for Teaching and Learning staff member who can consult on these matters, or a faculty member in the Writing and Rhetoric Department who is practiced in using rubrics.
For some instructors and contexts, the coaching model will closely resemble their relationship with students as a research advisor. A faculty member who works with master's students or doctoral students on their research projects will use similar patterns of mentoring for these project teams since many graduate students do reviews of the state of research, design projects, and needs to exercise good communication of their research through writing and presentations.
Extensive work would need to be done to help faculty learn to promote integration of knowledge outside of a strictly siloed disciplinary structure. Lots of work already exists on the pedagogy of using e-portfolios and reflection in courses that supports students in weaving together content knowledge, skills, and development.
Student Enrollment and Course Staffing
The above proposed model would be difficult if not impossible to realize if the department has a model of offering large lecture courses staffed by a single faculty member leading over 200 students, armed with anywhere from no TAs to a small army of TAs. Many of these courses balance a large-enrollment lecture that meets 2-4 hours a week with a smaller recitation section of between 15-30 students. Alternatively, this smaller section may be a lab section depending on the requirements that this course meets. This pattern is not only common at large enrollment schools (e.g. the public California State University system), but also in other institutions where an introductory level course may be part of the general education requirement (e.g. intro biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Often these staffing models have the TAs required to sit in and watch what happens in lecture to inform how they run recitations.
In our curricular design, the lack of prerequisites and course sequencing aim to balance out students among all available core courses during each term. The fundamental unit of enrollment for core courses would be considered to be a team of size 4. Thus, a typical small-enrollment course of 32 would have about 8 teams and a large-enrollment course of 80 might have up to 20 teams. In the typical enrollment of 32, the eight student teams would be mentored by two faculty and between two to six TAs or PMs who could mentor 1-2 teams each. A cap of 80 for any given course would be proposed such that a nested teaching team structure could reasonably cover all students: a team of ten TAs or PMs would mentor two teams each and up to five TAs would report to one of two faculty members leading the course.
Rather than viewing course load as solely a function of hours and number of sections, we instead advocate for looking at the number of student teams as well since in a coaching model, the instructors work would scale with the number of teams they are overseeing. Coaching instead of teaching (as is often interpreted in academia) works when interested and experienced individuals are available to help students in their project-oriented activities. These individuals guide students towards their own personalized learning that can be done outside of the physical classroom and leverage multiple asynchronous materials.
Data Collection and Analysis
In many cases, infrastructure that allows for systematic data collection from students exist and data can be tracked once the institution and/or department commits to a system of creating reports and ways of looking into the data. Students are generally tagged with multiple demographic information and course information on the registrar level that could be better investigated through a partnership with the registrar. Many institutions have institutional research personnel or offices that will administer school-wide surveys and exit interviews, that could be a major guiding force in creating department-specific surveys and automating the analysis. Such information could be organized by administration and student services professionals and presented to faculty once they are sufficiently de-identified. In today's era, we are experiencing a data deluge and just some extra effort and transparency can establish how to use these data regularly in departmental decisions.