24th March: Planning Started

Now that the 1EN11U course has a budget, it's time to draw up a timetable, so that our Personnel Department can start recruiting students to it. Professor Diane Pecorari, our Head of Department, expressed an interest in participating in the teaching of the theoretical aspect of the course, so here's my first mail to her about the organisation and planning of the course:

Dear Diane,

I know it's still not been decided who's taking this course in the autumn, but just in case it's you who'll be handling the theoretical section of the course, I'm sending you this preliminary planning.

As you can see, there'll be 5 credits of Practical English skills and 2.5 credits of the theory underlying what happens when people have to teach or learn their specialist subject in English (rather than their native language). I always start course planning by working out what the students have to do to pass, and then work backwards to what they have to learn in order to be good at passing the assignments. I've sketched out what we might ask them to do … although this can be changed easily. I also always work with a pot of 100 marks for each sub-module of a course, so that we can do the maths more easily! We've been working to a level of 60% for a Pass mark and 80% for a Merit, and there'd be a separate calculation for each sub-module.

The budget indicates that we can fit in seven 2-hour sessions in Second Life + 2 sessions in Connect. I've made a fairly generous estimate of marking time, since I'm expecting there to be assignments on the Moodle site which will need responding to, even if we're not giving them marks for them. I've included Connect in case you want to use that medium instead of Second Life (or maybe as well as). When it comes to actually delivering the sessions, one option is for joint sessions, where we hand over to each other, perhaps with me doing something practical and you taking over and coordinating the theory with the practice. In other words, you could perhaps have seven 30-minute slots, rather than one or two 2-hour ones. It's also possible that we might have to turn the 'Connect sessions' into 'Examination sessions'.

If we work on the principle of one lesson every second week, we could then start in week 37 (second week in September) and finish in week 49 (second week in December). In between sessions we can set practice assignments for them on the Moodle site in terms of discussion forums, reading assignments or specific exercises. For the 1EN11U courses (those are the internal staff training courses) I'm envisaging a set of morning sessions, culminating in an IRL meeting in Kalmar on one day, and a set of afternoon sessions, culminating in an IRL meeting in Växjö on another day. That gives us a little bit of leeway just in case we have staffing problems. The practical task of Leading a Seminar could well be combined with the theoretical Written Assignment, if the seminar they have to lead is about an aspect of the theory underlying the practice. There could well be an extra meeting in week 48 for examination purposes.

If you were to be working on this course, do you feel that this model is one you could work with? Do you have any suggestions for changes?

Yours,

David R
Kalmar

The initial planning document looks like this:

Parameters for the Teaching in English/Using English as the Language of Instruction Courses

5 credits of Practical English: Assignments

Giving Instructions - Oral and Written

Written Study Guide 30 marks

Oral Course Outline 10 marks

Teaching

10-minute Lesson Segment 30 Marks

Leading a Seminar 30 Marks

2.5 Credits of Theory: Assignments

Critique of a Paper 50 marks

Written Assignment 50 marks

Course Budget

I'm waiting on Diane's reply, so there could be some adjustments to both the nature of the course assignments and the time allocation, but at least it gives us something to go on.

25th March, 2013

No, Diane's not going to be able to be an active participant in the teaching team on the course, but will be looking to contribute a sort of 'guest lecture' (we haven't done any detailed planning yet, so I can't say what that'll be like). She's never worked in world before either, so it'll be interesting to see how quickly she gets up to speed.