Interesting, "course syllabuses" associated with 14 week chunks. In UK HE we (now) generally call these modules, with the course or programme made up of a collection of such modules.
Your " best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks." comment took me back to a paper that discusses, among other things, what happens when the "modules" drive and dominate the programme:
"An assessment arms race and its fallout: high-stakes grading and the case for slow scholarship"
Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Volume 40, Issue 4, 2015
Tony Harland*, Angela McLeana, Rob Wassa, Ellen Millera & Kwong Nui Sima
"This research questions the impact of assessment on university teaching and learning in circumstances where all student work is graded. Sixty-two students and lecturers were interviewed to explore their experiences of assessment at an institution that had adopted a modular course structure and largely unregulated numbers of internal assessments. Lecturers rewarded student work with grades and controlled study behaviour with assessment............................."
One does tend to lose sight of the programme. In Design programmes, particularly, the consequences of such module-driven behaviour tend to impact significantly on achieving the programme outcomes. Unless, that is, there really is a 14 week "Design" course?
Dr. Darren Southee
Programme Director MA Industrial Design & Technology
Design Practice Research Group
Energy Research Lab
Loughborough Design School // Loughborough University // LE11 3TU // +441509222662
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ken Friedman
Sent: 26 January 2016 12:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Open Syllabus Project
Friends,
You may be interested in the Open Syllabus Project. An article in the New York Times describes it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html
—snip—
COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear.
Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.
Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.
This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history.
—snip—
The Open Syllabus Project welcomes more syllabi for better coverage across a wider range of fields. Design is not well represented.
I urge you to visit the project web site, and I hope that you will contribute the syllabi you have developed for different courses:
http://opensyllabusproject.org
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|