18 days

[polly_mer]

While 18 days is especially short, I have taught a good number of 3, 4, 5 or 6 weeks courses over the years.

I'm often surprised that students do pretty well. The fail rate may be a little higher, but sometimes they seem to do better. Maybe it is because there's less time for the rest of their lives to interfere with their studies.

I wouldn't assign a long paper in very short courses. There's still time for students to do a paper badly, cramming the night before it is due, but not to do it well, with the research and revision process that we recommend.

And that, right there, is the problem.

How much of a problem depends on the definition of "long". 

Super Dinky had a winter term for years that was called The Research Paper and was designed for the first-year students to spend a whole month going through the writing, research, and iterative revision process.  The experience was designed as an immersive experience during which students lived in the dorms and worked on their research papers.  The students were to be doing nothing else as a primary activity, but socializing in the evenings was encouraged.  The result was most students entering the spring semester were then capable of writing a good paper with less explicit scaffolding because of that common experience with a common vocabulary regarding the expected process.

When SD moved away from that situation and had a more typical spring semester of freshman comp II, it turned out that the faculty decided to go with a two-page paper due at the end that didn't have to have any references.  The faculty screamed quite loudly when the general education committee made changes that required a portfolio approach with multiple 5-to-10 page papers that each needed revision.  It turns out that capping the sections at 15-18 so that faculty could provide the necessary feedback for revision hadn't been appreciated, but had instead resulted in the full-time faculty using that extra time to do other things like teach at other institutions for additional money or write books (SD had zero research requirements).


Several years ago, surveys started showing that students are not writing very many long (10 pages or more) papers.  https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/long-writing-assignments-not-so-common-at-us-colleges/4580476.html is one such article (and is clearly not written by the STEM folks who grade those 10+ page lab reports and progress memos because we know how much writing is required in professional settings).

Thus, the questions to Downer and others who are doing the very short courses are:

1) How much less work is assigned in the short courses so that students aren't getting the full experience?

2) Is the long course even living up to what the rest of us hope is being done in the intro/gen ed courses so that students learn what they need to know and can succeed in the later courses?

Being "almost as rigorous" as an already not rigorous course is not good. 

[downer]

Thus, the questions to Downer and others who are doing the very short courses are:

1) How much less work is assigned in the short courses so that students aren't getting the full experience?

2) Is the long course even living up to what the rest of us hope is being done in the intro/gen ed courses so that students learn what they need to know and can succeed in the later courses?

For 1, I can only report on what I do and what those I know do. I certainly know cases where people assign a lot less work for a short course. But there's large variation in how much work each gen ed course, between departments and between individual faculty. So reducing the workload for the short course may still not mean it is much easier than other courses.

For this course I'm teaching now, I cut it from 14 modules to 13 modules, since there were only 13 working days in the 18 day course and it was much simpler just to drop the last one, which was not particularly important. (This does raise the question: for short courses, can professors assign work for weekends and public holidays? I guess the answer is yes, so I could have squeezed in the extra module for a weekend assignment, or for New Year's Day. But I didn't.)

For 2, my answer is that I don't know, because I don't care. Dept Chairs see my syllabi and they are fine with them, and that's all I'm paid to worry about.

[apl68]

Super Dinky had a winter term for years that was called The Research Paper and was designed for the first-year students to spend a whole month going through the writing, research, and iterative revision process.  The experience was designed as an immersive experience during which students lived in the dorms and worked on their research papers.  The students were to be doing nothing else as a primary activity, but socializing in the evenings was encouraged.  The result was most students entering the spring semester were then capable of writing a good paper with less explicit scaffolding because of that common experience with a common vocabulary regarding the expected process.

Sounds like an interesting and useful course. 

I had already written a fairly substantial paper or two in high school, so I was ready for what we had to do in college.  I kind of assumed at the time that other college-bound students had done the same thing in high school.  I've long since learned that that was naive.

[downer]

The course worked out well. Students did a lot of work for the most part and I got more positive feedback from them about the course than I usually do. Only one student withdrew and none failed, which is probably better than I get in a regular semester. So I'd do it again, and there's a good chance I will.

I think some of the success was due to me scaring away some students with early messages about how difficult the course would be. The ones left were the ones willing and able to do the work.