Planning a course with a textbook

Purpose

You are assigned to plan a course that leads to a qualification, and you have a textbook. You want to have a series of classroom training sessions to cover theory and an on-job practicum to cover practical aspects.

The purpose of your planning is to have a simple, harmonious process to:

1. Give students a series of face-to-face training sessions
2. Use current resources (e.g. the textbook) to best advantage
3. Give students practical experience to learn their jobs
4. Meet training package requirements.

 

How long do you have for the whole course?

Look at the amount of time available, that is, the volume of learning. These are the recommended times for students doing a course if they start without training or experience in that field, for example:

Qualification	Typical time allowed
Certificate III	1 – 2 years
Certificate IV	0.5 – 2 years
Diploma	1 – 2 years
Graduate Certificate	0.5 – 1 year
Graduate Diploma	1 – 2 years

The maximum time for the qualification is the maximum you can plan to take if you have Austudy students, but times can be shortened for students who already have relevant experience. You can take longer for part-time students who will not get Austudy.

 

What is the job description that you are training students to do?

In an enterprise RTO, the organization should have a job description for the role for which you are training students. Check whether it is up to date and whether it meets generic industry standards. (Although it isn’t ideal, some students are required to learn more than one job description.) If you are training students to work anywhere in industry, you will need to consult widely enough to find or write a generic job description and set of expectations.

In the same way, you will need to locate any procedures, organizational structures and policies that are essential to the training.

 

Select an appropriate qualification and then select units

Start with the latest version of the qualification, and select the units that best suit the job description you are training students to do. (If you allow options for different streams, select those units too.)

1. Check that the qualification and the job descriptions outcomes are a good fit. The better the fit, the easier your life will be.
2. Check how will the job descriptions fit requirements for each unit. It could be possible to students to pass some units but not others.

 

Divide the course into subjects

In many cases, each unit will be a subject on its own, but not always.

• When units are on the same topic and considerably overlap, it can be better to combine them into one subject.
• A few units are so big that you might need to split them into two or more subjects. (Students will have to pass all subjects to get the unit.)
• In some internships, the classroom component is like one big subject, but at least divide it up into semesters or terms.

When you have sorted the course into subjects, assign subjects to their semesters.

 

About textbooks and other resources

Textbooks are normally designed to stand alone as coherent wholes but are almost never designed to cover a whole qualification, unless they were intentionally written for that purpose. It is more likely that they will cover a whole subject.

Textbook chapters are always put in a logical sequence, but you should check whether that is the best sequence for you.

1. Some chapters will match course requirements very closely but not completely.
2. Some chapters might cover multiple units. From the author’s viewpoint, it would be a mistake to have separate chapters when content overlaps so much.
3. Other than that, the textbook might have:
1. some gaps, which might be major topics
2. some extra material that is not needed
3. extra material that is needed for the job, but is not listed in the course outcomes
4. some introductory material that leads to the outcomes but isn’t actually part of the requirements.
5. discussion questions and assignments that could be used for class learning activities or for assessment.
4. If the textbook includes assessment activities, look through them. One assessment might cover many different requirements (especially if the activity is a project), so be careful not to over-assess. Decide which textbook activities:
1. are necessary for assessment.
2. are best for classroom discussions.
3. you won’t use at all.

Choose other resources, especially for topics where the textbook has gaps. These might be websites, paper handouts, or sections of other books.

 

A list of sessions

For each subject, you will need a list of sessions with a topic for each session. No matter how good a book is, it is not the instructor. The sessions need learning activities where students do something to process the information, make it their own, and learn to apply it.

1. How many sessions per week will you have with students? How long will each session be?
2. Make a list of all the content you need to teach for each subject. (It might include information that is not in the textbook.) Do you need to give some coaching in how to do assignments near the beginning?
3. Sort content into topics (or "chunks") of the size that you can do one topic per week for each subject. Some textbook chapters are short or easy and won’t take long. Others will take at least a couple of weeks and need to be split into separate lessons.
4. Plan a lesson for each week until you cover all the topics.
1. How long is your semester? A university semester is normally 15 or 16 weeks, and a school semester is about 20 weeks.
2. In each subject, the first part of the first session will be an introduction or induction, and the last session is usually an assessment activity of some kind.
5. Put the topics in an order that students can easily follow. If the book already does this, you might be able to follow the order of chapters in the book fairly closely.
6. Assign a section of the book as reading when you teach that topic. Ideally, students would read it before class, and then discuss it in class. However, students are naturally lazy and won’t read unless they have to do a task.
7. Put your list of weekly topics with readings in the course description document.

 

Lesson plans

How you prepare your weekly lessons is up to you. You will probably want to write learning activities and worksheets etc. because most instructors see teaching as a creative art form and want to put their personal style into their lesson design. However, you might be wasting your time if they are already written and easy to use.

To make this program reproducible:

• Write a proper lesson plan for every lesson, even if it’s only a set of discussion questions.
• Write your learning activities with enough detail for others to be able to use them.
• Keep notes of what worked well and what didn’t, and revise your notes and activities.

 

Assessing theory

It might sound good in theory to delay assessments until students are ready, that is, until you are fairly sure that they will pass. However, human nature means that students can keep putting it off. Students let work pile up, making it much more difficult and stressful with lots of catch-up work later on, resulting in delayed graduations. It puts both assessors and students in a lose-lose relationship, because students can hang on forever. The solution is to put rules in place beforehand to prevent problems, with disincentives for late work.

You have various options for assessing theory. Written assignments are probably a good option, especially if you have lots of students and are working at higher levels. (Besides, written work is better if you are later audited.) On the other hand, some students, especially those with activist/relater learning styles tend to do much better in oral interviews, although oral interviews are often less practical with increased numbers of students.

1. Match the assignments (a.k.a. assessment activities) to the session plan so you can give each assignment at a suitable time (e.g. immediately after the session on that topic).
2. Set reasonable deadlines for each assignment and put it in the plan. If students are late for the deadline, they fail the assessment but they get one more chance. If they miss that, they have failed the unit.
3. Put assignments and due dates into the course description document.
4. Estimate how long students on average should take for assignments each week. In one system, the internship was counted as 30 hours per week. Include assignment time in the internship hours. They can take longer but it is their own time. (Taking longer might indicate that they are either lazy or need coaching in how to do assignments.)

 

Course description

Plan to give students a copy of the subject description document at the first meeting of each semester. To some extent, it is a contract stating what you will do and what they must do to pass the subject. Then stick to the plan as closely as you can. The better the plan, the easier it will be to follow. Don’t start making it up as you go along, the euphemism for which is being flexible.

 

Practicum

1. Decide how you will give induction to applicants.
2. Check that the job descriptions and relevant procedures are clear enough to act as a guideline for practicum performance. However, they will probably not be as detailed as your assessment tools based on competency statements.
3. In the course description document, refer to the relevant job description, e.g. You will be assessed in the role of…. (See Staff Handbook pp. ….)
4. Have a system of reviewing individual student progress to:
1. Know whether or not they are on track to pass.
2. Give students regular feedback.
3. get regular feedback from on-job supervisors
4. Give regular feedback to on-job supervisors.

Set an assessment period for the practical for each qualification (e.g. two or three months) and write the start and end dates in the unit description. If students don’t do everything well enough to pass at that time, they get one more chance. If they miss that, they fail the relevant units.

Note: You will probably find that some workplace supervisors are very good at supervising interns and others are not, even though they are extremely confident.