International Arts, Collaborative Course Design, Team Teaching: At the Intersections

Paper

Our proposed session explores the edge effects encountered during a collaborative course design project to convert a resident introductory lecture course to a team-taught, project-based online course. What happens when a traditional lecture course goes digital? What happens when a single instructor course is redesigned by an interdisciplinary team of graduate students and instructional designers? What happens when an international arts course becomes more inclusive and diverse in the artifacts it studies? What happens when students become agents of their own learning through a semester-long project instead of taking tests and quizzes? What happens when an online course is team-taught? It is at these intersections that the team wrestled with the questions, negotiated challenges, and made design decisions that produced an excellent course experience, based on students performance and feedback. In this session, we'll discussion our collaborative design process, best practices and challenges, and the outcomes of the project.

Takeaway

Attendees at this session will takeaway best practices for interdisciplinary team approaches to collaborative course design and team teaching. Specifically, we'll facilitate discussion around the following topics:

• Team-Based Course Design - How to create a shared vision, determine learning objectives, identify common topics and sub-topics, and create media-rich lesson content.
• Student Engagement - How to design a semester-long project for a high-enrolling introductory online course, how to facilitate rich online discussions.
• Team Teaching - How to team teach effectively, including calibrating grading and planning for instructor presence, in an online course.

Overall, we'll share our design process, student feedback from midcourse surveys, and lessons learned along the way.

Abstract

This session explores the edge effects encountered during a collaborative course design project to convert a resident introductory lecture course to a team-taught, project-based online course. The course, Introduction to International Arts, a requirement for a minor, had long been taught as a large lecture course with multiple choice quizzes as the primary activity for students. An opportunity arose to explore a different strategy for the course - alternative delivery modes, new expert perspectives, richer projects for students, and a team teaching approach. The new strategy required the team to explore zones of transition - from traditional to digital, from individual to collaborative course design, from objective assessments to student-led course projects, from instructor-led to team-taught.

To begin the project, a cross-disciplinary team consisting of two instructional designers and three graduate students from art history, music, and architecture, respectively, was convened. We began the design process by interviewing the previous instructor to discover what worked best in the lecture format, and preserved the case study approach the course had long employed. With a framework for organizing the course in place, the team crafted a shared vision, identifying course goals and learning objectives, selecting more global and diverse artifacts for study, and brainstorming new student activities. The team worked collaboratively over a summer to prepare the online course, refining the design, identifying a project-based assessment strategy, and creating media-rich course content. The online course was piloted in Spring 2018, co-taught by the graduate student course authors to about a hundred students. In this session, we'll discussion our collaborative design process, best practices and challenges encountered, and the outcomes, including student survey data, of the collaborative project.