Tips & Tricks: Developing a new curriculum in less than seven days

Recently, a higher-education institution asked me to develop a new science and technology course from scratch. This particular course has not been offered previously at the school. Specifically, I was asked to submit a 10-page-minimum curriculum proposal on what materials I will cover and how students will be assessed. The document will be reviewed by some seemingly “mysterious” judges, i.e. a committee.

The most challenging part is that I only have less than a week to draft the course proposal since the school would like to roll out the course in the near future. With another full-time job and various personal matters at the time, this task, assigned to me as a rushed service, felt nearly impossible at first but went well in the end. I thought to share some high-level lessons I learned during this intense process.

Lesson 1. Put students first

Although the immediate “product” of this task is to be delivered to and reviewed by my faculty superiors at the institution, it is important to note that the ultimate purpose of the course is for students to have a positive learning experience. With this in mind, I assure you that you would be more motivated and less stressed out: you now have a higher-order purpose.

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash

Specifically, what do I mean by putting students first? The answer to this question may vary depending on many factors, including the subject disciplines, course format, and delivery, etc. However, I can think of a couple of examples as a set of questions to ask yourself:

• Which group of students (e.g. majors) might be in your class?
• What academic or career interests they might have?
• What academic preparations (in my case, programming) might they already have on average ?

Keeping some of these questions in mind helped me in planning the course schedule and content.

Lesson 2. Outline, Outline, Outline

Planning is key to success. If you have taught any writing-based course, this idea is probably very clear to you: plan your writing using an outline.

When drafting your own course material, I found the very same advice that I gave to my students to be extremely helpful. Especially for a course in your own discipline, I found it easy to want to include everything that I am excited about or everything that I believe to be very crucial to know. However, remember these simple facts:

• Students only have a finite amount of time in any given term to learn, and you have finite time and resources to teach.
• Students won’t be equally as excited about the subject matter as you are (at least, not everyone and not at first)

Therefore, I started with the course schedule page (which is not a requirement of my task), planning out the modules and how much time should be spent on each module. The course schedule is actually a table with a few columns as shown below.

Outline first, writing the second. If you do so, you’d less likely wander into rabbit holes and get lost. Even better, the latter becomes a “fill in the blank” task for you.

Lesson 3. Formality is just as important as the content

The institution reached out to me for a very simple reason: I am a subject matter expert whom they trust. Further, they believe that I can finish the course proposal within a short amount of time, i.e. a rush service. This implies that the choice of topics and the actual course content wouldn’t necessarily be the focus during the review process (although I am almost certain that some technical standards still need to be met).

So what comes next? Formality.

Photo by Ruthson Zimmerman on Unsplash

Make sure your document is properly formatted, clearly written, and presentable in a confident manner. I use the word “confident” because it is a way to acknowledge the institution’s trust in you.

I surveyed the existing course templates, syllabi, and other curriculum-related documents that I could find on the institution’s website. I followed the general formats (e.g. sections, headers), the tone in writing, and even the fonts/font sizes. Although I cannot say 100% for sure what is being evaluated, it is almost clear that if you follow the framework already existed or adopted, the chance of your curriculum proposal being approved would be much higher.

Lesson 4. Focus on completeness rather than perfection

When I was doing my capstone senior project in college, I remember one of my professors repeatedly said to the class:

The DONE capstone is the GOOD capstone.

This is especially true given the task was assigned to me as a rush service.

When it comes to designing a course, there is no doubt that the accuracy of your content should be a priority. To be clear, what I am going to discuss here is more about the level of detail that you should strive for.

Photo by Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash

Going back to the previous ideas I mentioned:

• Remember you should have an outline to follow. The idea here echoes the importance of having an outline. Doing so, all you need is to fill in the blanks, rather than having your course proposal grow indefinitely. When you finish filling in the blanks, you are done (almost).
• Remember that formality is a big deal. You can spend the rest of your time polishing the document once you are filling in all blanks of your outline. For me, this part is the more pleasant part. When I am taking my break from the other job, I open up my finished proposal, proofread, and correct for inconsistencies whenever I encounter them.

I wrapped up the documents with a cover page and a table of contents, mostly for formality reasons, obviously. When sending it away to my stakeholder, I made sure to have a well-written cover letter (email).

Bottom line

The four ideas above are what I thought to be most relatable. Ultimately, everyone’s subject matter expertise varies, and everyone’s tasks and circumstances are never the same. Consider my advice here as a “fun read” rather than tenets to success. When it comes to a task as such, perhaps all you need to do is:

1. Take a deep breath
2. Get started early (don’t procrastinate)
3. Sprint (but don’t get burned out — take breaks)
4. Revisit your work

Disclaimer: This article does not intend to provide any formal or legal advice — read at your own risk. The views shared in this article solely belong to the author and do not necessarily represent those of any other individuals or entities. The author is responsible for intentional or unintentional misuse of any information presented.

This article was drafted largely using voice.