What makes a class successful? Fink (2013) has argued that factors that make a difference in teaching and learning success could be categorized into four major issues:
- How well do you know your subject matter as an instructor?
- How does the interaction between teacher and student work out?
- Classroom management: what instructors do about getting grades back on time, handling incivility in the classroom, and so on.
- Course design, or structuring the entire course experience into a coherent whole.
Fink argues, and we’re inclined to agree, that at the university level, if we assume faculty are already competent in their subject matter, the most critical of these is course design.
Syllabus
To comply with State requirements, UCF has moved to a third-party tool in Webcourses called Simple Syllabus.This new tool is required to function as the official syllabus for each class; thus, there should no longer be PDF uploads of a syllabus document. To learn more about Simple Syllabus and how to use it, visit the Simple Syllabus page on the Provost’s website.
With this switch, the Faculty Center no longer hosts a syllabus template. We do host a page related to syllabus best practices (such as which optional components you should include in Simple Syllabus). As noted above, the syllabus is a key component of effective course design.
Core policies that apply to all UCF courses are embedded in Simple Syllabus and cannot be edited. However, Simple Syllabus also allows for course-specific policies (such as technology policies, or policies on late work, etc), so we host a separate page of possible optional policy statements for your syllabi.
Other Course Design
We have several pages dedicated to various aspects of course design, including Curriculum Mapping, Backward Design, Design for Accessibility, Lesson Planning, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and Assignment Design and Assessment.