2 Course Template: Overview

We have created a Blackboard template for LEH 250. You can modify it to make it work for your section. You will be able to import it into your section. Then you will be able to rearrange, add and subtract as makes sense for you.  We want you to do this! This is why we have built the template in a modular way..  With a few exceptions in the college success pillar, you can do this material in any order.

Here, we present the three pillars separately in part to explain our working model. How visible you make this to studets is up to you. However, in many cases you can integrate the pillars in various ways based on your model for the course. For example, the library pieces from academic skills clearly can be used in the context of your disciplinary content. The college  reading material applies to whatever you are reading in addition to their other courses.  We have, in many cases, created minimal content on a topic that we encourage everyone to do, but  you may want to go into more depth on it. We do ask that everyone use some variation of the student success project and the deep dive. And of course, every section of 250 should address the common student learning outcomes and the institutional learning outcomes as explained in the “Characteristics of a Lehman Graduate” material.

The course template envisions three main pillars of content and learning objectives.

1.  The first is highly structured and involves introducing students to Lehman College, its systems and opportunities.  These materials are in highly structured modules that should require only minimal course time and that students complete on their own as homework.  You are free to expand or further explore these, but the core modules should be considered the minimal work for this.
2. The second group focuses on academic skills such as information literacy (e.g. using the library), time management, note taking and others.
3. The third section focuses on disciplinary content.  In the design of your course, this is where you bring in your background, training and research interests.

These sections are not meant to be sequential. It is up to you to remix as you choose.

You will need to add your “secret sauce” to the template, but the skeleton will be there.

Many things that you do in the course will tap into two or more pillars and that is great. It is up to you to determine how much you will do that. Feel free to put things in a different order or to combine two or more together in ways that work for you.

The only exceptions are that you should have students do the SPARC  and they should do Understanding Yourself as a Learner unit.

There are also several common elements that we ask you to assign. Among other things these will let us assess whether the course goals are being achieved.

1. College success plan.
2. Disciplinary content: Annotated bibliography
3. Disciplinary content: Deep dive project  including presentation.

Architecture of the Course

We have endeavored to create a course template that takes advantage of Blackboard features and works around some of its limitations. We explain how to use some of these in a later chapter.

The class starts with welcome message  focused on the characteristics of a Lehman graduate; we encourage you to do a second welcome message that is more personal. This is something that it can be good to do prior to the start of the class. We also link a welcome discussion board for students to introduce themselves.

This will enable you to determine who has engaged in the class and facilitate submission of verification of attendance.  .

College Success Skills

Chapter

Modules

• Module 0:: Getting started
• Context matters
• Know your community
• Change is ubiquitous
• Professionalism matters
• Wellness is challenging
• Success project

Lightning Community Certificate

These are self contained and students should be able to do them on their own., although a brief introduction by the instructor will be helpful.

• SPARC
• Handshake
• Library
• Club Central

Academic Skills

Chapter

• Library
• Reading in College
•  Writing in College
• Academic Integrity
•  Yourself as a learner:
• Goals
• SWOT
• Capital

Disciplinary exploration and learning

Chapter

Deep Dive (common framework across all sections)

  Bring your own content !

Options

You can choose to put these together in ways that make sense in your individual courses.  They should not be viewed as a week by week plan, though the template can be used that way to some extent.  The individual chapters of this book about  each of the pillars go into more detail about ideas of how to implement this.  You can also decide not to do some of these, but we ask you to keep the overarching course goals and outcomes in mind.

The template and preparing for assessment

In order to assess whether LEH 250 is achieving both its course learning outcomes and the institutional learning outcomes we ask you to consider two things.

First, if we gave you a check list of the learning outcomes, at the end of the semester could you check a box indicating that you had addressed those outcomes?  Would a student who passed your course with a B or better agree?

Second, if we looked at a sample of “artifacts” from your students who got at least a B, would they reflect foundational level mastery of information literacy, oral communication, and  leadership potential?  For this reason, we ask you to use some version of the assignment  involving creation of an annotated bibliography, the oral presentation and impacting your community.  However if you come up with  alternative ways to  address these goals, please do.

More details about assessment will be shared  during the semester, but our goal is to reduce the burden of assessment for LEH 250 faculty while facilitating the likelihood of having good and useful data to share and continue  to develop the course.