Have you designed a course or curriculum? Share your experience.

This submission will review an experience in the course design process and some

challenges faced. It will also share a sample of a designed course material with some

features which were considered during the production of the said material.

Maria, N. (2019) interprets course design as to how a course is planned and created, in

terms of intended learning outcomes, topic, content, structure, and sequence. About

seven years ago, I worked in the English language department of a polytechnic in

Saudi Arabia. Our main client was a dairy and food technology company whose

employees we would train for two years. The trainees (employees) had an obligation

to undergo training at our institute before being allowed to work in the factory. Our

institute provided courses in maintenance and repairing (mechanical & electrical),

food technology, bakery science, and dairy farming. The trainees had to be taught the

English language for a year intensively before embarking on their specialist course in

the second year.

Our client had made a formal complaint that the trainee graduates could barely

communicate with their line managers in the English language and in addition, the

English language curriculum being used was not in any way related to the technical

language used in the plant. Being a multinational company, most of the managers

were English language speakers who could hardly speak the Arabic language.

The academic manager called a meeting to strategize on how we would design

English language communication materials that would help meet our clients’ needs. In

a team of six people, my colleague and I were tasked with making frequent factory
visits for data collection. The data collection involved: interviewing line managers,

taking photos of the factory machines, recording videos of conversations between

employees and managers, collecting documents from the factory as well as from the

institute. The data collection was meant to study the topics and language that we

would include in the course material we were planning to design.

Data collection was an ongoing process, and every week, we had to set time for plant

visits despite the instruction hours that we had at the polytechnic. In the same week,

we would have to share the collected data with colleagues and discuss how best we

could design effective and relevant communication materials.

The instructions we received were that the course produced had to have translations,

transliteration, and words difficult to pronounce had to be linked to a website called

www.howjsay.com. The “howjsay” website would encourage self-learning as students

would be able to pronounce words without the instructor’s help. Below is a sample of

the designed course material.

The underlined words in bold and blue color are linked to www.howjsay.com website

for pronunciation.

The Arabic words / phrases in between brackets are transliterations.

The Arabic words outside the brackets are translations of the phrases.

At the end of every completed unit, students had to self-evaluate what they had

achieved. After students tick through a given checklist, the instructor is required to

check and if any students did not attain the intended lesson objective, then the

misunderstood part of the lesson could be retaught. See below for the end-of-unit

checklist.
My main tasks were data collection, inserting translations and transliterations after a

unit or chapter had been completed. It was a very demanding process; we would

complete a single unit of the course in not less than two weeks. Each time we

completed a unit, instructors would test the designed course materials in class on real

students and give feedback on whether to add some more information, make

alterations or have it approved as it was.

The main challenges we faced in curriculum designing included: noncompliance from

managers and employees during data collection; grading the materials into different

levels; balancing between instruction and course designing time; negative feedback

from other departments; impatience from authorities; accessing copyright-free images

and avoiding infringing copyright claims.

It took us almost two years to complete one level, daunting task but satisfying and

worth every ounce of experience. I had never studied any course in curriculum or
course design. Through mentorship, guidance, and collaboration from colleagues, I

was able to participate in the involving course design process.

Conclusion

Course or curriculum designing requires a lot of patience; using negative feedback to

improve; determination; courage; and self-belief. I am looking forward to learning

more from this perspective to produce relevant and effective learning materials.

This submission discussed the experience and challenges encountered in course the

design process. The submission also displays a sample of a material produced with

some of its features and uses.

Reference

Internet

Maria, N. (2019). The Same but Different: Reframing Contemporary Online

Education in Higher Education Towards Quality and Integrity. Avondale College of

Higher Education, Australia