Course Reviews
Teaching Center staff conduct syllabus, course material, lesson plan, learning activity, course shell, and/or assessment reviews and provide feedback for improvement. They can also assist academic units in developing processes and standards for conducting peer course reviews and can help train instructors to carry out reviews and deliver feedback to colleagues.
Benefits of Course Reviews
For Schools and Departments
Conducting school or department periodic course reviews can be used to
- map and align course- and program-level learning objectives
- to inform faculty development or curriculum improvement efforts
- to engage instructors in the process of sharing course materials and learning from one another
For Instructors
Course reviews can be used to:
- check alignment between course learning objectives, assessments, instructional activities, and course resources
- address a teaching or learning challenge. For instance, a course review could help you revise the design of an assignment that did not go as well as you had hoped.
- help you implement an innovative teaching methodology or change the delivery of your course
- make revisions to a course you inherited from another instructor
- improve the overall effectiveness of your course
Resources and Readings for Course Reviews
- The Syllabus Checklist, created by the Teaching Center can be used to self-assess the completeness of your syllabus
- The Peer Review of Teaching Project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln provides a model for documenting and displaying instructor development of a course via a course portfolio. The site contains information about how course portfolios are used for peer review of courses, as well as many sample portfolios created by instructors.
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The authors describe the creation and outcomes of a course review process which was developed and applied to 30 required courses in a PharmD program.