ASTR 1120-002 Spring 2003 ž BACKGROUND

The way in which this course is taught was pioneered by Professor Richard McCray in the APS Department at CU, and is being supported by grants from the Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign, from the National Science Foundation, and from CU. You can read more about what goals and philosophy of this course in this Proposal to the Pew Foundation.

Philosophy

The philosophy underlying this course may be summarized in the following statement by Prof. McCray:

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This philosophy essentially determines the structure of this course. In brief, instead of three lecture per week, the course follows a weekly cycle consisting of (1) an introductory lecture, (2) a learning team session, and (3) a discussion class. See Learning Teams for full details.

The discussion class is key to the course, for it is in this class that students explain concepts to their classmates.

To make the discussion class work, two ingredients are essential. The first essential ingredient is that the students are split into teams. This not only makes the logistics of discussion in a class of 200 tractable - discussion questions are addressed to teams, not to individuals - but it also makes the discussion less intimidating, because a student is supported by teammates. The second essential ingredient to making the discussion class work is that students must have spent time in advance studying and composing answers to potential discussion questions.

These two ideas - the need for teams, and the need for students to prepare - lead to the concept of learning team sessions, the chief goal of which is to allow students to work together to prepare answers to discussion questions. Getting the members of a team to work together cohesively requires an experienced team leader, a learning team coach. In this course, learning team coaches are recruited from undergraduate students who have previously taken the course and done well in it.

The remaining class of the week is a standard lecture class. Early, experimental versions of this course tried doing away with lectures altogether, but this proved too much, and now one lecture a week is back by popular demand. The lecture is the instructor's opportunity to provide the intellectual motivation and structure that carries students through the rest of the week.

Three more things are essential to making the course work: (1) a resource, here the hypertext, from which students learn material, (2) a grading system which rewards individual students and teams appropriately and equitably, and (3) Course Software, through which students submit answers to discussion questions over the web, and which compiles grades. Experience shows that everything is in the details. Defects in the hypertext, grading system, or course software are not well tolerated by students.

Updated 2003 May 6