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I'm intrigued by the structural approach of "pattern teaching" as a method for designing individual class sessions. Certainly seems like a useful approach for those classes where you have trouble fitting everything in (or even deciding what everything is). At the same time I'm really uncomfortable with the article's tone, which verges on "teaching is that thing which gets in the way of research."

What do you do to convince students to study the hard way instead of the easy way? Or what do you do in your course design to make the hard way look easy?

I appreciate the way this podcast episode structures accessibility tips to talk about which steps toward universal design are easiest to achieve, or have the most bang for the buck.

From Cathy Davidson: "There is almost no field untouched by this COVID pandemic or irrelevant to it. I do not mean we all have to suddenly become trauma therapists. That's dangerous (unless we are trained to that role). And it doesn't mean making every class "about" the pandemic (that would be awful). It means being sensitive to the devastating historical moment in which we are now living. Before we even think about a syllabus or videos or Zoom, think about what it means to be a student. Now."

"based on the collective experience, over many years, of CUR members who have engaged undergraduate students in research, .... Roger Rowlett, Linda Blockus, and Susan Larson have drawn on this extensive knowledge base to design an instrument to assist institutions to self- assess the maturity of their undergraduate research programs. The instrument aspires to present the best practices in undergraduate research."

Designed for economics, a number of these modules in areas like service learning and just-in-time teaching are also adaptable to other disciplines.

"So the solution may be in having a well defined rubric but being able to apply it with discretion and sensitivity to individual learner differences." Rubrics seem to have garnered quite a bit of attention as a teaching and grading tool, and reflecting on their design and appropriate use seems important.

Some goals and appropriate technological tools for designing a first year experience.

This testimonial brings up a crucial aspect of course design--making sure that you have reasonable expectations for your own workload when developing activities that require significant amounts of direction and feedback from the instructor.

UC Davis has created a system to issue "digital badges" to certify student growth in a set of seven core intellectual competencies. This system exists along side the degree, major, and course grade, and is designed to act as something similar to an electronic portfolio to presents students' particular accomplishments.

Resource page on quantitative reasoning from Carleton College, including example assignments and tips for assignment design, and assessment tools.

An interesting approach to the way an institution's design affects the kind of education it delivers. Considering Kenyon's ongoing consideration of general education requirements, I'll exerpt here the last paragraph as a prompt for discussion: "General education is often thought of as a means to expose students to a broad range of "essential" knowledge and to provide a historical context for the culture in which they live. These are valid, but insufficient, goals. The purpose of general education should be to produce graduates who are skilled in communication, imbued with quantitative reasoning skills, instinctively collaborative, inherently transdisciplinary in their approach to problems, and engaged in their local and global communities-broadly educated individuals with an informed perspective on the problems of the 21st century and the integrative abilities to solve them."

"So while the similarities between the flipped classroom and studio/lab/seminar courses probably outnumber their differences, there is something different, and it's in the intentionality of the design behind both the in- and out-of-class experience."

How do you look at a map, and understand it as an argument about data? And how do you recognize common holes in those arguments? This might be a useful reading for courses with a mapping (or map-reading) component.

A great article about map design, from the simple ("does that data really need to be on a map?") to the complex ("normalize your cloropleth"). Includes a couple of recommendations for mapping tools at the end.

A review (published 2006) of available resources for interdisciplinary course design and teaching.

A collection of Google Earth map files, designed to help students think about the geographic locations in various literary works (and the travels of their characters). The site also includes links to some good Google Earth tutorials.

This site provides a simple template for re-building or re-designing a course that already exists, but it could be used to craft an entirely new course too. Technically this site is all about blended learning, but the steps are not meaningless if one is not blending. Go ahead and apply them to a more traditional pedagogical approach!

"Do nothing in isolation; always connect the events." The author says this in the context of a digital humanities program, but I think it applies to all professional development efforts, and probably to many course designs.

"Backward design" is a popular approach in planning a syllabus - start with your goals for what the students will learn and practice, and work back from there. This article suggests an interesting twist on that process. Concentrate on how your work will flow during the semester, and use your imagined ideal month to make sure you have the time and energy to meet your teaching goals.