Activity Outline

Sunday Evening
By the end of the evening we want…
Participants able to describe the value of taking a user-oriented design perspective.
Participants drop their baggage. In order to maximize productivity in we want participants to get as much of their backgrounds on the table as possible initially
Participants describe the context in which they are designing. If we don’t identify the context first, we might design the right thing for the wrong place.
Design teams formed from individuals with similar common interests. The central concept of the workshop is that participants go through the exercise of designing a first year course. We would like them to be designing with people who have similar institutional contexts.
Sunday Evening Activities:
Global Plenary (1.5 hours). The keynote address(es) will focus primarily on the first objective. Instructional mode will be primarily powerpoint, due to the constraints of multiple locations.
Institutional framework development (1 hour). Participants will create a set of “frameworks” to describe their institution and who the non-student stakeholders are at the institution. Instructional mode is individual worksheets and small group discussion. Output is completed individual worksheets.
(10 minutes) Facilitator introduces concept of frameworks, and the objective. Ideally this has been introduced somewhat in the plenary.
(25 minutes) Individuals fill in frameworks describing their institution and stakeholders. These will effectively be worksheets addressing:
the people at their institution,
what their institution cares about, and
what the state of the first year design process is at their institution.
(25 minutes) Individuals share and discuss their frameworks with other people at their table.
Creation of teams. After individual frameworks/worksheets are completed, the facilitators will use the frameworks to create design teams with similar institutional backgrounds, etc. Note that this does not involve participants.
Monday Morning
By the end of the morning we want…
Participants able to describe characteristics of their students that are relevant for designing curricula.
Participants able to articulate a high-level vision and high-level learning objectives.

Monday Morning Activities
Team Assignment, Introductions and Icebreaking (20 minutes). Individuals meet other design team members; share their work from previous evening with their team members; decide on a team name. Teams of approximately 4 people; each team has a table and some form of posting space (e.g., a tack board)
Student Framework Development (1 hour). Design teams will create create one or more frameworks that describe the students that they are designing their curricula for. This activity is less structured than the previous evening – in the evening, individuals filled in worksheets to create their frameworks; in this case, we will provide some suggestions/guidance on this in the form of examples and questions, but the teams need to negotiate what kinds of frameworks are relevant, and create them from scratch. Instructional mode is design studio; output is a poster capturing the team’s student framework(s).
Facilitator introduces concept (10 minutes)
Teams work to create framework poster (50 minutes)
Break
Development of Vision and Outcomes (80 minutes). Design teams will create two posters describing their course vision. One poster will be a vision statement for the course; the other will be a list of approximately 5-7 high level outcomes for the course. Instructional mode is design studio.
Individual Ideation (10 minutes). Individuals use post-its to write down things that they think are key ideas for both the vision and the course outcomes. These are short phrases, in response to prompts:
“This course should…”
“At the end of this course, our students should…”
Affinity diagramming (30 minutes) The team will sort the post-its into related areas, draw connections between areas, and label the areas, using butcher paper and markers. Objective is to identify areas of agreement, areas of synergy, and areas of disagreement.
Vision and Outcome Generation (40 minutes). Using the affinity diagram, the team will come up with a vision statement for the course, and a list of outcomes.
Monday Afternoon
By the end of the afternoon, we want…
Participants to have identified curricular ideas and resources that might be useful to them in designing a course when they return home.
Participants to have generated a concept for a project-based course appropriate for the students they described in their frameworks.
Monday Afternoon Activities
Shopping Spree and Lunch (2 hours). This is a poster session in which participants and other invited guests (leaders in first year stuff) are presenting things that they are doing or thinking about doing in the first year.
Design teams are instructed to “do work” while perusing posters. They should identify N ideas that might be modifiable/applicable to their own contexts. Note that an idea is not “use Purdue’s curriculum” – it’s “Purdue has a great way of doing team assessments. Maybe we could use that element.”
Design teams regroup and discuss what they saw with respect to their vision and outcomes.
Preliminary Course Design (3 hours+). Design teams will a poster describing their course concept. Instructional mode is design studio.
Using the vision and the high level outcomes as priming, design teams generate and sort raw ideas for their course design (45 minutes).
Project ideas
Assessment ideas
Instructional/organizational ideas
Design teams will select ~3 alternatives, and will create more detailed gallery sketches for these alternatives (1 hour).
Design teams will create a final concept poster (1 hour). It should describe:
Who the course is for
What the project concept is
How the course is organized, what a typical day in the course is like
How the course is assessed
Tuesday Morning
Sorry – this is weak right now, but I thought it better to send it out…
Course Concept Poster Session (1 hour). Teams present their course concept to other design teams.
Curriculum Reform Case Study (1.5 hours). Instructional mode: Case method. As a group, we will review a case of a curriculum reform, in an attempt to see if we can identify any general lessons to take home. See case study.
Planning for Staffing and Sustaining (1.5 hours). Instructional mode: Small group discussion.

Activity Outline

by Intro Engineering on Jul 09, 2009

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