Recap: January Course Design Workshops
Plus upcoming events for spring 2025
Welcome back! All of us at CETL are excited to start a new semester and looking forward to supporting your teaching in the coming weeks.
Earlier this month, we announced our spring 2025 events and programs. We’re covering a wide variety of topics in our workshops this semester: reforming grading, motivating reading, promoting transparency, supporting executive function, and, of course, teaching in turbulent times. We’re also facilitating reading groups on Academic Ableism and Teaching with AI and organizing a number of offerings for graduate TAs and instructors.
We started the semester, however, with two workshops on course design: the first, facilitated by my colleague Josh Eyler, was entitled “What Do You Want Your Students to Remember in 20 Years?” and the second, facilitated by me, was about “Motivation in the Age of AI.”
You’ve probably already designed your courses for the semester (at least, we hope you have…). But you might find the principles of these workshops helpful nonetheless. Below, you can find a quick recap of each.
What Do You Want Your Students to Remember?
Josh began the first workshop by suggesting that our approaches to course design might be making the challenges we currently face in the classroom more difficult. Most course design frameworks, even ones that we generally recommend, focus on immediacy and urgency—what has to happen this semester, this unit, during these specific class days? What we most need at this moment, however, is to slow down and take the long view of our work with students.
Inspired by James Lang’s 2018 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Josh invited participants to consider not what their learning outcomes will be for the semester but what they wanted students to remember from the class 20 years from now, long after they’ve left college. When Jim and his colleagues considered this question, almost no one talked about the specific content of their courses. In fact, in some cases, content students learned today would be outdated 10 or 20 years down the road. Rather, the group “hoped to have transformed our students in some fundamental way — to help enrich their intellectual lives, to make them into better people, to give them the skills and knowledge they would need to make the world a better place.”
To spur some thought on this question, Josh asked us to recall what we learned in our own college classes—a prompt that set off lightbulbs for many of us. It turns out that most of us didn’t remember specifics of course content, especially for subject areas we didn’t pursue long term. But we did remember exciting, hands-on assignments, the sense of passion or curiosity we experienced in the classroom, and how our instructors made us feel as novices in a discipline.
After this clarifying reflection, we thought about our own courses, considering not only what we wanted students to remember in 20 years but also how this long-term vision might change our approaches to learning outcomes, assignments, or even our choice of course content. Thinking through these prompts always helps me clarify my purpose in the classroom when I get lost in the weeds, and it’s something I plan to return to at the start of each semester.
Motivation in the Age of AI
My own course design workshop started with a touchy question: how can we ensure that students are doing their own work and learning when outsourcing assignments to AI is easy, free or low-cost, and virtually undetectable?
My answer to that question may be either encouraging or discouraging depending on your perspective. I would argue that we aren’t going to police or even design our way out of the problems created by AI. Rather, students have to see value in the work we ask them to do, and they have to want to do it. The only sustainable way to address the challenges we’re facing is by doubling down on student motivation.
This is no small challenge. But we have lots of research and tools that can help.
One framework that might be especially useful is self-determination theory (SDT), a theory of motivation that is concerned with “how social-contextual factors support or thwart people’s thriving through the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy.”
The bulk of the workshop considered ways we might promote autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom. Autonomy and competence are obviously important for student success: when students don’t have a sense of agency and don’t feel that they can effectively accomplish the work we ask them to do, they’re not likely to be very motivated.
The aspect of SDT that most interests me right now, however, is relatedness. Most of the work on relatedness is about community and care: we’re all more motivated when we feel that we belong to a supportive group of like-minded people who can help us develop. Creating community and belonging in the classroom is clearly important.
But I also want to broaden our definition of relatedness to consider how we might create meaningful connections to students’ lives outside the classroom—how we might uncover links between our course and the other communities students are a part of. Many of our students feel alienated from the work of college and don’t understand its value beyond the credential they attain from completing it. They are hungry to know the purpose of what they’re learning—not just for their own future but for the good of the world at large.
So, in the final part of the workshop, I invited participants to apply these concepts to their own contexts. What is the value of learning in your course? Why should students want to do it? What personal or self-transcendent purpose does it serve? What good does it create in the world?
Once we’ve answered these questions, I think we’ll be better able to design courses that feel authentically motivating to students—and ones in which they’re less likely to outsource their work to AI.
So: What do you want students to remember from your course in 20 years? What’s the purpose of teaching and learning in your discipline? Please share your answers in the comments!
If you’re eager for more reflection, we hope you’ll join us for one or more of our spring workshops or take advantage of a teaching consultation, classroom observation, or student feedback session this semester. No matter your discipline or teaching level, we look forward to working with you!