Many professors were sensitized by the pandemic-driven move to distant learning to the need of course design. Maintaining students on track in an online course calls for clarity and organization; it also calls for teachers deliberate consideration of how to inspire and involve students at design colleges in Jaipur, encourage participation, and evaluate student learning without the benefit of in-person proctoring.
One can only hope that the epidemic is approaching its conclusion, and hope, too, that the growing concern with course design will continue. Let me thus use this time to talk about seven creative learning- and learner-cantered course design ideas meant to foster social-emotional development, met cognition and reflexivity, and critical thinking and student involvement.
First, let’s consider three strategies now ruling course design. A topical approach has many benefits: it’s simple; all one needs to do is look at how other professors have structured comparable courses and either replicate or change their syllabi. This strategy guarantees material coverage as well; if done correctly, it also provides a coherent and progressive subject order.
Of course, a topical strategy that stresses content, coverage and information flow is out of sync with the times even when it is supported by video, animations, online courses and interactive problem sets.
Innovative Learning Approaches in Jaipur’s Design Colleges
Most campuses now want teachers to define a set of quantifiable learning goals spelling out the information and abilities students are supposed to gain and be able to show.
Designing Backward
Backward design guarantees the most straightforward method for making sure a course has well defined learning goals. Simply plan backward to go ahead. The guiding idea is to start with the goal in mind. Begin by stating the results you want your students to reach; next plan a series of exercises that will let them get the knowledge and skills you desire; finally, develop tests to determine if your class members have fulfilled your learning objectives.
Backward design is not a cure-all, however. One reason is that defining learning goals with the appropriate degree of accuracy is not simple. Coming up with quantifiable learning goals that aren’t too basic or too complicated, too narrow or too wide, and, most importantly, too many is rather difficult. Ultimately, the design process needs to be effective at a degree of detail that is not reasonable.
But there is a more serious issue. Backward design ignores a fundamental reality: students are different. What works for one class might not be suitable for another. Teaching calls for a certain level of improvisation, flexibility, and customization that backward design does not fit well.
Learner-Centered Course Development
A method that starts with an analysis of the students, their needs, traits, expectations and prior knowledge, and the limits on learning—for example, the amount of time students can fairly be expected to devote to the course—begins not with the outcomes but rather with
Certainly, a learner-centered, student-focused approach makes sense. Still, this strategy has its own shortcomings. It puts a lot of pressure on the teacher to create activities fit for the requirements and interests of the pupils, which almost surely differ greatly. Your pupils, after all, vary greatly in their degree of readiness, learning objectives, drive and degree of involvement.
What, therefore, are the substitutes for backward design and learner-centered design? As you create or update your courses, here are seven creative ideas to think about.
A Question-Based Approach
An inquiry-based approach to course design turns students become investigators or detectives and enables them to create significant questions, solve issues, analyze data and other types of evidence, and contribute to the generation of knowledge.
The inquiry technique I want to propose is not only centered on issues, such as when and why slavery came in England’s New World colonies. Instead, it welcomes the fundamental discoveries of critical or postmodernism.
This method aims to question master narratives, challenge too often accepted truths, and try to grasp many viewpoints and realities based on an individual’s position or situation. This strategy helps students to constantly question: What do we know and how do we know that?
Informed by postmodernism’s ideas, the question method enables students to comprehend how knowledge is built and how apparently resolved conclusions are challenged and changed.
Of course, inquiry might be open, individual or group, organized and led or free. It might be more open-ended and creative or validate what is previously known. This method emphasizes research abilities and higher-order thinking skills, puts students at the center of the learning process, and helps them attain conceptual knowledge.
A Case Study-Driven Approach
A case study method structures a class around a sequence of crises, pivotal episodes or events, critical junctures, legal cases, and other real-world situations where the students can examine the decision-making process, the societal or professional response to a dilemma, past precedents for current events, societal and cultural change over time, and shifts in public concerns or values or in scientific knowledge.
One of the benefits of this strategy is student participation in genuine issue solving. Well-chosen examples may bring a subject to life, promote active student participation in their own education, inspire debate and conversation, and enable students to improve their critical thinking abilities.
A Decoding the Discipline Method
This approach familiarizes students with the tools, abilities, and interpretative strategies academics in a certain area employ. This methodological and skills-based approach could, for instance, educate students on how professionals in a discipline gather and analyze data; grasp causality; read a graph, a text, a document or another piece of evidence; or grasp different social, biological or psychological processes.
A Team-Taught, Interdisciplinary Approach
Still, a single academic from a different disciplinary angle teaches most courses. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to provide additional classes that purposefully connect cross-disciplinary points of view and approaches or that include interdisciplinary points of view? Georgetown has exactly done this with its Core Pathways, where students complete seven-week courses from many academic perspectives on the world’s major issues, like climate change and humanity and technology. UCLA’s cluster program accomplishes something similar as multidisciplinary academic teams investigate urgent concerns of our day.
A Gamified Approach Gamification may take many different shapes. Serious gaming, video games in which the aim is not amusement but education, practice and skills development. There are role-playing games such as Reacting to the Past. Simulations and interactive virtual worlds also exist.
A Policy-Oriented Strategy
A policy-oriented approach methodically tackles policy creation and delivery; it is a variation on problem-based education. Students do policy evaluation, policy implementation, policy planning and development, data analysis, and policy research. This strategy almost certainly helps students to grasp the technical, political and organizational obstacles to change, theories of change and the part of stakeholders in policy choices.
A Project-Based Method
A project-based approach replaces results with process and product or performance. This “show us what you know” model evaluates student learning not by homework or tests or examinations or response or research papers, but rather authentically: by a concrete outcome, usually a capstone project or presentation or exhibition or recital that must fulfill certain criteria.
Conclusion
Project-based learning from design colleges in Jaipur depends on scaffolding. Vague instructions and supervision are inadequate. A project has to develop in phases under defined deadlines, direction and regular comments.
