The document outlines an agenda for a workshop aimed at designing new first-year courses. On Sunday evening, participants will develop frameworks describing their institutions and stakeholders. They will then be formed into design teams. On Monday morning, teams will create frameworks about their students and develop a vision and learning objectives. In the afternoon, teams will identify curriculum ideas from a poster session and work on a preliminary course design. On Tuesday, teams will present their course concepts and discuss a curriculum reform case study and planning for staffing and sustaining new courses. The overall goal is for participants to design new first-year courses appropriate for their institutional contexts and student populations.

2. Participants drop their baggage. In order to maximize productivity in we want participants to get as much of their backgrounds on the table as possible initially

3. Participants describe the context in which they are designing. If we don’t identify the context first, we might design the right thing for the wrong place.

5. Institutional framework development (1 hour). Participants will create a set of “frameworks” to describe their institution and who the non-student stakeholders are at the institution. Instructional mode is individual worksheets and small group discussion. Output is completed individual worksheets.

6. (10 minutes) Facilitator introduces concept of frameworks, and the objective. Ideally this has been introduced somewhat in the plenary.

7. (25 minutes) Individuals fill in frameworks describing their institution and stakeholders. These will effectively be worksheets addressing:

8. the people at their institution,

9. what their institution cares about, and

10. what the state of the first year design process is at their institution.

11. (25 minutes) Individuals share and discuss their frameworks with other people at their table.

14. Student Framework Development (1 hour). Design teams will create create one or more frameworks that describe the students that they are designing their curricula for. This activity is less structured than the previous evening – in the evening, individuals filled in worksheets to create their frameworks; in this case, we will provide some suggestions/guidance on this in the form of examples and questions, but the teams need to negotiate what kinds of frameworks are relevant, and create them from scratch. Instructional mode is design studio; output is a poster capturing the team’s student framework(s).

15. Facilitator introduces concept (10 minutes)

16. Teams work to create framework poster (50 minutes)

17. Break

18. Development of Vision and Outcomes (80 minutes). Design teams will create two posters describing their course vision. One poster will be a vision statement for the course; the other will be a list of approximately 5-7 high level outcomes for the course. Instructional mode is design studio.

19. Individual Ideation (10 minutes). Individuals use post-its to write down things that they think are key ideas for both the vision and the course outcomes. These are short phrases, in response to prompts:

20. “This course should…”

21. “At the end of this course, our students should…”

22. Affinity diagramming (30 minutes) The team will sort the post-its into related areas, draw connections between areas, and label the areas, using butcher paper and markers. Objective is to identify areas of agreement, areas of synergy, and areas of disagreement.

25. Design teams are instructed to “do work” while perusing posters. They should identify N ideas that might be modifiable/applicable to their own contexts. Note that an idea is not “use Purdue’s curriculum” – it’s “Purdue has a great way of doing team assessments. Maybe we could use that element.”

26. Design teams regroup and discuss what they saw with respect to their vision and outcomes.

27. Preliminary Course Design (3 hours+). Design teams will a poster describing their course concept. Instructional mode is design studio.

28. Using the vision and the high level outcomes as priming, design teams generate and sort raw ideas for their course design (45 minutes).

29. Project ideas

30. Assessment ideas

31. Instructional/organizational ideas

32. Design teams will select ~3 alternatives, and will create more detailed gallery sketches for these alternatives (1 hour).

33. Design teams will create a final concept poster (1 hour). It should describe:

34. Who the course is for

35. What the project concept is

36. How the course is organized, what a typical day in the course is like

38. Curriculum Reform Case Study (1.5 hours). Instructional mode: Case method. As a group, we will review a case of a curriculum reform, in an attempt to see if we can identify any general lessons to take home. See case study.

39. Planning for Staffing and Sustaining (1.5 hours). Instructional mode: Small group discussion.