Wednesday, August 24, 2011

I don't think I like courses designed by committee

I'm meeting with my Intro to College Life freshmen* for the first time tomorrow. Well, we met for a hot second last week, but since the mandatory presentation in the Big Auditorium took up 35 of the 50 minutes of class, and then I had to find my students in the crowd, we didn't really have time to say much to each other.

Anyway, I have been reading over the syllabus and now I kind of want to shoot it. There is a half-page-long list of Course Goals and Learning Objectives**, including such items as "Students will clarify their values about cultural and gender diversity" and "Students will manage finances, time, and stress effectively" (is clarifying values like clarifying butter? and has there ever been an eighteen-year-old in the entire history of the world who has managed finances, time, and stress effectively?) Good God. I hope they don't think I wrote this stuff.

The course is described as "a series of freshman seminars focusing on a variety of topics," although in fact more than half of the meetings are being held in the Big Auditorium with speakers who talk at the entire freshman class for fifty minutes and show powerpoints. Which kind of makes me think the person who wrote the course description doesn't know what a seminar is.

But! The rest of the class meetings are mine, and I think we can dispatch the official topic for tomorrow's session ("Navigating College Online") in about five minutes, which leaves us loads of time to talk about why we have college and about enlightenment. (Why yes, I did sneak some actual reading assignments onto the syllabus.) And maybe the students will get to, you know, say stuff, as should happen in a seminar.

I feel so subversive. Don't tell the administrators.

* Freshwomen, actually, since all five of them are female. This isn't particularly unusual given Misnomer U's demographics, but I do wonder if it's a sign that we're having trouble recruiting men to the humanities.

** What is with the fad for including Learning Objectives on everything, anyway? Do students actually want them? Do any of them read that part of the syllabus? For whose benefit is this supposed to be?

7 comments:

Renaissance Girl said...

RE: the crazy fad for learning objectives. I just learned yesterday, at our beginning of term meeting, that the national accreditation folks are now demanding such information for each course to establish the true academic contribution of that course. For us on the ground, of course, it's another hoop and a lot of work.

Fie upon this quiet life! said...

Ugh - don't get me started on the learning objectives....

Fretful Porpentine said...

RG -- Yeah, we're told it's an accreditation requirement too. What I don't understand is why we can't simply supply this information on demand to accreditors, or put it on a website somewhere, or something. Anything but putting it on the syllabus, which is, or should be, for the students.

Bardiac said...

Deep down, accreditors believe that if you tell students they're learning something (say critical thinking) enough, they'll think they've actually learned it. Instead, of course, students develop cynicism about such things, which isn't altogether a bad thing.

Renaissance Girl said...

Oh, we DID have to put it on all our syllabi.

Susan said...

Yes, it's all part of the accreditation/accountability bandwagon. Not only that, we have to align our course learning objectives with the Program Learning Objectives.

The syllabus is endless... And our accreditor does spot check syllabi during the site visit.

ntbw said...

My university is getting ready to go through its every 10 year major accreditation. We have a university wide database in which we have to enter objectives, outcomes, and assessment data for all levels of instruction. We also have to be prepared to produce syllabi that list objectives aligned with university-wide objectives. Evidently we are meant to have been doing this for the past decade, though in reality I think we only have about 5 years' worth of data.