Examples of Good Curricular Design

[mythbuster]

This is an issue that we are starting to have at the department level. Mine is a large department for a popular major (Biology).
    We have now reached the point that all the basic areas of the field are researched by someone in our department. As a result, when we get to hire another person because of increasing teaching demand, people are now pushing for increasingly niche sub-specialties.  While it might by nice to be able to offer "Sub-Tropical Bird Songs", not enough students will enroll. In our majors, most only take 2 or at most 3 true elective courses within the major. The rest are all core requirements. So if the Bird Song specialist can't teach core Ecology, or even Intro Bio to our majors, they are of little help to the department. This leads to arguments about the amount of influence the teaching demands should have on who we hire - at our compass point State aspiring to be R2 institution.

[Ruralguy]

This really depends on how much backlash you can tolerate from students in the classes with the faculty who can't really teach the subject. Also, expect complaining from the faculty who you force to teach subjects that aren't in their specialty. 

[Caracal]

This really depends on how much backlash you can tolerate from students in the classes with the faculty who can't really teach the subject. Also, expect complaining from the faculty who you force to teach subjects that aren't in their specialty.

I never really understand that attitude. I prefer teaching courses that take me pretty far away from my own scholarship. There are limits-I'm not qualified to teach medieval history-but generally I find it easier and more enjoyable to teach things that I'm less intellectually invested in.

[Ruralguy]

I was running through my numbers again from my previous post.

If you do that sort of calculation again, but in the denominator include not just faculty salary and benefits divided by yearly credit load but also  added to that    ( remaining annual budget costs)/(N_students x Credits per student), then the recalculated ratio does come out to be pretty close to 20. However, if you have a lot of other contributions to income besides effective tuition per student and per credit, this number is reduced a bit. Still, for my school, I don't see a way to get it under 10 (at least not with reasonable assumptions).  As you might guess, we have plenty of classes running under 10 students. Even more running under 20.  Probably two or three depts. are consistently running a significant majority of classes with enrollment above 20.

[pepsi_alum]

Not sure if this would help, but during the Great Recession, my current department decreased the number of required courses in the major by increasing the number of major electives (e.g., "Everyone must take Basketweaving 200, 250, 350, and 400" became "choose 12 credit hours from this list"). At the same time, the department decreased the total number of courses offered every semester.

I wasn't there at the time this was implemented, but my understanding is that this had the effect of freeing up faculty to teach the courses that we truly had the most demand for (e.g., since Basketweaving 400 no longer had to be offered every semester, we could offer more sections of Basketweaving 101). It was unpopular with the faculty at the time, but it did stabilize the department's numbers.

[dr_codex]

Not sure if this would help, but during the Great Recession, my current department decreased the number of required courses in the major by increasing the number of major electives (e.g., "Everyone must take Basketweaving 200, 250, 350, and 400" became "choose 12 credit hours from this list"). At the same time, the department decreased the total number of courses offered every semester.

I wasn't there at the time this was implemented, but my understanding is that this had the effect of freeing up faculty to teach the courses that we truly had the most demand for (e.g., since Basketweaving 400 no longer had to be offered every semester, we could offer more sections of Basketweaving 101). It was unpopular with the faculty at the time, but it did stabilize the department's numbers.

This is kind of what people are mulling at my place. It does promise flexibility, and would be noticeably better if enrollment numbers fluctuated a lot. (Our numbers don't generally fluctuate. We are pretty much capped out for what we can take, with few exceptions.)

Of course, there are other workarounds. If Basketweaving 400 cannot fill every time, offer it every other semester. Or every second Spring. You have to be consistent, so that students can rationally plan, but it can work.

[polly_mer]

Of course, there are other workarounds. If Basketweaving 400 cannot fill every time, offer it every other semester. Or every second Spring. You have to be consistent, so that students can rationally plan, but it can work.

The next problem comes into that planning for each student.

A system that is truly a cohort system works: everyone enters at step 0 with a standard background and progresses at exactly the same pace taking the classes prescribed to get through in the same amount of time.  Taking any time off as an individual student means taking enough time off to join a later cohort at the appropriate restart point.  It's pretty common to have online RN-BSN programs work like that structured for part-time college enrollment alongside full-time work.

A program that has students joining at nearly every term with random backgrounds is much harder to work as part of a planned rotation for mostly required courses.  That's one reason that transfer students often lose tens of credits; the system can accommodate transfers who have reached a certain point of readiness-in-major to join an in-progress cohort, but the system can't accommodate random acquisition of skills to avoid taking courses that will repeat some material along with the new material. 

The less standardized a large major is across institutions, the harder to accommodate transfer students who are partially complete.  Calc I is calc I nearly everywhere.  The sequence of a given topic like transport spread over several courses will get you to the same place in chemical engineering, but that sequence may look very different between institutions such that to transfer smoothly, you need to either be at the start or end of the sequence instead of the messy middle.  Unfortunately, for the engineering programs I have reviewed for various purposes, there are usually several of these sequences in progress at once so transfer is definitely losing credits.

A different concern for the curriculum planning is the percentage of students who are full-time versus purposefully part-time.  Much discussion is being held in places where people talk changing college demographics about being able to accommodate part-time students who are making progress, but it is slower than four year.  The every-even-spring works great for cohorts.  It's harder to make that work if the part-time students are all on different plans that aren't like a cohort of half-time (6 credits per semester), three-quarter-time (9 credits per semester), full-time (12 credits per semester), full-time at the recommended specific credits per semester (for engineering, that may be 15-18 credits, depending on specific term and how the labs work out).

It's harder to make the every-even-spring work when even the first-year students start at different places due to dual credit, AP credit, and/or transfer credit.  That's one reason that many very selective institutions won't take AP or transfer credit.  Having the knowledge and skills means an easier course for some students, but everyone must be at a minimum level of proficiency to move through as a cohort and there is no mixing and matching with cohorts already in progress.

One financial aid problem that has become more prevalent is not having enough required credits to take in a term to be a full-time student.  The federal financial aid rules are such that only the number of electives and gen ed required for the major count.  Once someone has maxed out their free electives and met all the gen ed requirements, federal financial aid will not count additional credits.  One very sad case at Super Dinky was a student who transferred with just 30 credits left, all in the major, and still had several semesters because of the logical sequence of the courses as prerequisites of each other.