Welcome to eLearning and the Faculty Center’s “Saddle Up for Semesters” Course planning workshop! Now that it comes right down to it, what needs to change in your class to make semesters successful for both you and your students?In this video, we’ll talk about creating a semester calendar that allows you to use best practices. Even if you don’t know yet whether you’ll be teaching 1, 2, or 3 times a week, you can do a lot of pre-planning of your semester calendar to help you incorporate the best practices. Here’s an example of the class that Victoria Bhavsar, director of the Faculty Center and eLearning, teaches in the College of Agriculture. This image shows only the first 8 weeks, as you can see. By the way, supplemental materials for this webinar include the whole thing, plus the original quarter calendar for contrast. The quarter class is a 3-WTU lecture plus a 1 WTU lab. The semester class will be a 2-WTU lecture plus 1 WTU lab. Notice that there are no dates yet – Victoria created this calendar without knowing what the time module of the class would be at this time. However, because she has taught the class in the past as a long, 3-hour, once per week lecture plus a lab, she made the assumption to start with that she’d have a once-per-week lecture in semesters as well. When she knows what time module she’ll really teach in, she can fairly easily go back and adjust this course calendar. To plan the topics to go from 10 weeks to 15 weeks, Victoria split up a couple of topics. For example in the quarter class, Soil physical properties and soil erosion up in the early part of the term were covered in the same week. In the semester class, each topic gets its own week. This is a very good thing, pedagogically speaking. Students will have more time to internalize the information even if very little more class time is spent on each topic. Also, one of the most difficult topics in soils, colloids and CEC, got TWO weeks in semesters instead of one week in quarters. Again, this is great. The lab is the place where Victoria has the luxury of more weeks. Previously, for example, there was no field trip to evaluate soil quality site properties – that’s now been added into week 5. And, in the quarter classes she had to cram setting up an incubation along with the soil physical properties II lab. In semesters, they can be more relaxed and give the incubation its own lab period. This is especially good because setting up the incubation probably won’t take the whole lab period – so they can do some more review on soil colloids, which are pretty difficult. Or they could incorporate a very detailed midterm review. To plan the course calendar with the goal of making sure that there are plenty of checkpoints and active learning opportunities, Victoria simply used a template that included a column for those things. These are Victoria’s initial ideas, and they may well change as the time modules shake out. But, notice that every single week there is something active, and something that can act as a check point for student understanding – a brain dump, a quick quiz, a problem set. By the time students hit the midterm in week 5, they’ll have gotten plenty of experience in how Victoria asks questions and formulates problems. Thinking through this whole course calendar took about 3 hours while waiting at the car repair shop, so it didn’t take a huge amount of time. What it did take, in addition to disciplinary knowledge and experience teaching the class, was good knowledge of active learning and checkpoint strategies – which eLearning & the Faculty Center’s “Saddle Up for Semesters” materials will offer.