Prequel to the Process ft. the School of Public Health’s BSPH Program

Spring semester is in full swing and so are this year’s new projects. The designers at CETL have started implementing a new exciting (just trust me for now) program design process that we’ve been working on for a hot minute. I won’t get too into the weeds about all of that in this post, but you can learn more about the new process and follow along with the projects by going here https://sites.gsu.edu/cetl/2020/01/14/whats-new-in-course-and-program-design-at-cetl/

For this post, I’m going to do my normal thing where I try and get meta about the process and talk about how we were able to get to this point.

For the last few semesters, aka “a hot minute,” a lot of my work has focused on designing and mapping curriculum with different programs around GSU. The CPD has worked on programs before, and it certainly falls into our skillset, but historically, course work has made up the majority of our projects. Up until now, our formal processes also focused primarily on course design. What this means is a lot of the curriculum work was ad hoc. We can still do quality work that isn’t course design, but it can be harder to scale and replicate consistently.

To create a process that helps with these issues, you need to practice, fail, and iterate. A lot of the work over the past few semesters was just that. Learning what does not work and what does for the specific needs of faculty at GSU. To do this well, you need great partners, and thankfully, CETL had just that. I worked with many exceptional faculty and admins, and I want to take a moment and focus on one group, specifically.

The School of Public Health’s Bachelor of Public Health (BSPH) partnered with CPD over a year ago. During our time together, we focused on helping them map and audit their curriculum. Some goals during this project were to confirm alignment between courses and accreditation standards, align courses with the college to career competencies, leverage Coursetune to map and report program and course data, enable faculty to share their course curriculum with their peers and discuss overlap and spiraled scaffolding, and a ton more.

Kim Renee Ramsey-White the undergraduate program director shared some of her thoughts on this experience

Working with Taylor on our curriculum mapping project was such a great use of our team’s time. We were in a place in our new program where we really needed to have a good sense of what content was being taught in our major and upper level courses. Everyone on our team knew that scaffolding of course content and assignments would be extremely important to ensuring that our students are receiving quality and relevant instruction.Taylor worked with the eight full-time faculty in our program to help us construct appropriate course and module objectives, he also taught us how to use a new program called “CourseTune” to actually visualize our program. The work took time, but it was time well spent.  

Hey, It’s Taylor again!

Faculty are asked to do so much and having them set aside time to work on this project with me is a big ask. The BSPH faculty exercised a high level of commitment and patience as we worked towards their goals using methods and tools brand new to GSU. Beyond achieving their goal of mapping curriculum, the engagement and feedback of the BSPH faculty equipped the CPD team with the ability to better serve all GSU faculty with the processes developed. Each designer and faculty relationship is different, and you never know exactly how it’ll turn out. Thanks to the BSPH faculty, this project ended up being a beautiful example of how faculty and designer relationships can be fruitful for all.

If you’re ready to do more than just read about what we do, or you have any other questions, you can contact us at cetl.gsu.edu

Taylor spends his time at CETL designing learning experiences and eating assorted breads;