How to Make the Best Damn Course in our College

This summer, I’ve given myself a goal – to make the web app development course into the BEST in our program.  After rereading What the Best College Teachers Do last fall with my fellow MIS professors, I’ve been itching to make some changes.  It’s not that I think my current class is bad.  It’s not.  But it’s not great, either.  I do some things well, but not enough.  At the end of the day, students don’t love and appreciate the knowledge they learn the way I want them too. That’s going change. 

I started by reviewing the pedagogical principles for effective teaching.  As I’ve written about before, there are 4 pillars to teaching concepts.  Discovered by Ausubel, these four pillars state students learn concepts best when, 1) definitions are clearly provided, 2) exemplars effectively show concepts in action, 3) new concepts are integrated with existing knowledge, and 4) students are provided with motivation to learn. Too often teachers (myself included), overemphasize one of these four and underemphasize other pillars to the detriment of learning. I’ve seen the results of this when my students walk away from my class not understanding concepts that I thought I taught well.  That’s not saying all students will develop equal understanding of the concepts.  But if many of the best students don’t fully understand a concept, that’s a good indication that I didn’t follow these four pillars. 

Hierarchy of Knowledge Principle

Along with these 4 pillars, there are several principles that I use in designing the structure of the course.  First, the introduction of new concepts must be based on the hierarchy of knowledge. In a nutshell, this principle takes pillar 3 above and gives it structure over time.  In order for students to integrate new concepts with existing knowledge, existing knowledge must be already present.  Just as you can’t learn calculus until you learn Algebra, I shouldn’t teach PHP until students understand HTML.  But it gets far more nuanced than that.  For example, a student can’t write code to read and display records from a database until they learn how a loop works – and an array – and basic PHP syntax. While this might seem obvious, it’s often neglected or assumed without checking to see if certain concepts were learned. 

This past week, I’ve been drawing a concept map for the course, listing the key concepts I want students to learn and the order in which they must learn them. My next step is to develop exercises and quizzes to assess how well they learned it. 

The 80/20 Principle

The second principle comes from the 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferris, where he applies the 80/20 rule to learning.  He suggests that when quickly learning new skills, students should focus on the 20% of knowledge that provides the 80% of capability. Whether or not those percentages are accurate, the principle underlying that idea is important.  In order to quickly master a skill, the learner (or teacher) should choose the concepts that provide the biggest bang for the time allotted.  Of course, this means the teacher should have a clear vision for what he want students to be able to do when they finish their course.  But it also means that he carefully considers the entirety of knowledge within this domain and pick only those things that will best improve their abilities.  

To that end, I wrote a new vision statement for the course.  I want students to learn “how to read/interpret models in order to develop data-driven web applications.” While previously half the semester focused on e-commerce (for which I wrote a textbook), this focus seemed disjointed as if I was teaching two courses.  There wasn’t one overarching vision for the class.  More like two related themes, one in web development and one in e-commerce. It also wasn’t clear if these e-commerce lessons focused on the critical few skills necessary for new Systems Analysts.  Certainly, they are important.  But were they critical?  After applying the 80/20 principle, I realized that the depth of e-commerce I covered wasn’t a critical skill for our grads.

However, that begged the question “what would be critical for them to learn?”  The answer to that comes in the form of our capstone.  In the capstone, students must build models of a business process and then develop and implement a technology solution based on those models.  While students learn how to build those models in our Systems Analysis and Design course, they do not learn how to read models for development and implementation.  And yet, one of the keys to writing good models is to make something that others can interpret.  Placing students on the opposite end by reading and interpreting models forces them to take the developer’s and/or designers perspective.  This ability to take different perspectives provides a super power in terms debiasing one’s thinking and becoming more objective and skillful in one’s thinking. As I explain in the lecture below, the power of seeing other perspectives is critical for good decision-making.

By removing the e-commerce concepts, time opened up for adding one more advanced PHP skill. But what to pick?  Should I have them build a message board, a content management system, a registration system, a retail site, or perhaps a search engine? There were so many options. 

Again, I applied the 80/20 rule when considering those options.  I had two weeks to teach one advanced skill.  So I asked myself “What one skill would best prepare them for life after graduation?”  I had to keep in mind that we’re not trying to teach them to be developers, rather System Analysts. So I wanted to focus on more complexity in the models, not necessarily on the development. To that end, students needed to see and understand models for highly integrated applications.  And how are web applications highly integrated? Through web services, of course.  

This line of thought led me to research best practices when working with web services in PHP.  I found a PHP extension called cURL that allows developers to upload and download files containing data to a web service. Using cURL, students could develop a web application based on a Data-flow-diagram (DFD) that asked for integration with an external entity.  In other words, the project would provide a proof of concept for how DFD’s include external data flows.  Or in terms of  pillar 2 – an exemplar.  

Feedback principle

My next challenge is to improve the course design to ensure rigor.  As I posted a couple years ago, rigor is one of the cornerstones of highly effective and outstanding courses.  With this sense of rigor, I’m not referring to a course that, as Kelly Elmore says, contains excessive amounts of homework and stressed out students.  Instead, I’m referring to a course where learning is deep, meaningful, and sticks with the students long-term.  

Perhaps the best way to ensure rigor is through comprehensive feedback and requirements to improve based on that feedback.  I used to be better about this.  But as my class sizes have grown, my ability to write detailed feedback has diminished.  I simply don’t have the time, nor stamina to do this effectively.  This has frustrated me.  I wanted to give extensive feedback and require them to edit based on those edits.  But doing so led me to burnout.  So I cut back on doing it. 

And then I came to a realization.  Written feedback is good, but who says I can’t achieve the same impact through oral feedback.  What if I provided an in-class review of projects?  I could require a rough draft by a certain date and then spend a class period reviewing those submissions and suggesting improvements.  Students would hear my thoughts directly, see innovative ideas from others, and hopefully take those lessons to heart.  After the review, the students would then have a few days to modify their projects and submit a final draft. 

I understand this could be challenging for students. Many of them will not feel comfortable showing their work or facing the scrutiny of a professor’s comments in front of their peers.  But unfortunately, they will have to eventually show their work when they get on the job in front of their peers and bosses.  If they are chronically anxious about that prospect, it will negatively impact their ability to succeed.  Learning to overcome such anxiety in a caring classroom environment will help them develop thicker skin, see their work more objectively, and achieve better outcomes.  They will learn that feedback, even negative feedback, will accelerate their growth. 

Conclusion

Well, that’s as far as my thinking has gone on making the best damn class in the MIS program and the College of Business.  The 4 pillars of conceptual development and 3 principles of instructional design provide the framework for my course redesign.  I still have 3 more months to bring it together.

But I’m curious, what principles am I missing?  Share your thoughts in the comments below.