Hi there, my name is Sharon Blanchard and as a new(ish) faculty member, I am finding myself bringing in all new courses and multiple different preps this first year.

When posed with the task to lead a group discussion or new topic in this year’s Collaborative Learning Days, I thought I would lead a discussion that would (selfishly) help faculty like myself who are looking for ways to organize ideas, thoughts, materials, and other improvements to our courses.

Ideas come to me all the time. Sometimes, it’s a big change and comes to me after the semester has started and its something I cannot change as I teach that semester. Other times, it’s right after I have finished a course and I have ideas on what went well and what I would have done differently. Finally, I think of ideas as I’m grading student work, or as I reflect on the course toward the end of the semester after activities have passed.

Some strategies that I have used in the past and throughout this semester is to keep a notepad for each course. It helps me write down thoughts and ideas. It was very helpful for me to plan out and generate ideas on improvements.

Another strategy that it seemed I “morphed” into is to use an electronic source to collect my thoughts. I did this for a few reasons:

1. I didn’t always have my notepad with me to take down notes
2. I didn’t have my note pad with me when I was wanting to make improvements
3. It’s more difficult to lose an electronic document rather than a post-it or piece of paper
4. I’m much faster at typing rather than writing
5. I like the formatting on a document over an 8.5 x 11

I began using a Google Document for each course to document new resources, ideas for improvements, and updates to the course that need to be done before the next iteration. I found it easy to have a hidden folder called “Instructor Resources” that I put a link to this google document; it allowed me to always have it with me when I was working on the course in Talon.

I also liked this process because it allowed me to copy the link from term to term and share the document with other faculty that teach the course and gain their lessons learned and ideas for improvements to the Talon course/shell.

I’m very interested in learning from more veteran faculty about their best practices on documenting continuous course development. The word on the “street” is that it takes about 3 times(years) to really feel comfortable teaching a course. I think this topic is extremely beneficial not only to me as a new faculty, but as we are using our Learning Management System (Talon) more and more for course delivery, it is a great topic for faculty to revisit as we use developmental courses and copy content from term to term.

Please follow and like us: