Activity: design a course syllabus

A single session plan is one thing, but how about an entire syllabus? Again, GenAI tools may be quite good at this because there are so many syllabi available online. Not only have the LLMs been able to learn what common syllabus structures look like, they have had access to differing content internationally, which might bring up some things you hadn't thought of. As with the single session example, they have been trained on a wide variety of situations and so may be able to generate ideas for different classroom conditions and scenarios and so may generate ideas that you wouldn't have thought of. For most of us, our course plans/syllabi are public information, so uploading them to a GenAI tool is not giving away any new information. So this may be an acceptable application of GenAI tools for many people.

Activity aim: Use one of the widely available GAI tools to make a session plan

Objective: To explore the potential of GAI tools to support session planning

1. As usual, you need to start with choosing one of the GenAI tools. Any simple chat tool will be suitable.
2. Start by writing a general prompt which asks for output about designing syllabus in your context. If you have a set template for your course plans, include all the information that you would usually need to put in. Here is a possible structure:

 “I am planning a course for first year bachelor/undergraduate students of XXX on the topic of XXX (insert your own programme and course title and edit the details of the credits and scheduling to suit, of course). The course is worth 7.5 ECTS credits, which represents around 150 hours of total student activity, including all their class and examination preparation. They will have 30 hours of scheduled class activity, timetabled into 10 3-hour blocks. Please generate a course plan with learning objectives for the whole course, a list of content divided into 10 sections. Also add time for induction and ideas about how to assess each part of the syllabus. "

3. Review the output, thinking about your own students. Try refining the prompt to be more specific. You can ask it to: 
   1. produce detailed session plans for each week (see Activity: design a teaching session)
   2. refine the detail in the assessment (when I try this, tools usually output unrealistically large assessment tasks to begin with).
   3. add pre-requisite course information (eg the syllabus of a course the students should have completed before this)
   4. add suggested textbooks, or tell it what your set textbook is and ask it to use the outline of the book to refine the content
4. When you are happy with the output, ask the tool to write a handbook for your students, perhaps using a standard template from your department.
5. As you refine your prompts, note how the outputs change and consider whether you could have started with a more specific prompt to get a satisfactory answer more rapidly. 

 

Bonus: add to your teaching portfolio.

Write some notes about what you did in this activity. Make a note of how the syllabus compares with an existing one, and whether it gave you any new ideas. Would you use any parts of the syllabus and how it fits in with your underlying approach to teaching. Could this approach save you time in the future?