Course calendars: making a course schedule

I am thinking about how to build the schedule for my course.  Even though I’ve taught it before, scheduling is intimidating.  It has a few components:

  • There are topics that will be uncovered over the semester.  Each topic has associated informational materials (videos and text), typical student questions, follow-up check yourself questions, an in class activity, problem set question(s), skills and procedures, and assessment questions.
  • The course will meet up to 37 times, but as few as 26 times (I need to decide how many days we will meet), and the topics and learning materials need to be distributed over time.
  • The schedule of meeting days changes each semester.  This year we’ll start on a Wednesday and end on a Monday, with just one class meeting after Thanksgiving (which is a little insane – we almost always have two meetings after Thanksgiving: it looks like our semester is one MWF shorter this fall than usual).

I saw this resource from CMU, which suggests three different ways for framing out the information: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/design/contentschedule.html

It looks like RIT also has some design tools that could be helpful: https://www.rit.edu/academicaffairs/tls/course-design/instructional-design/design-tools