Designing & Assessing Courses & Curricula : A Practical Guide

Rating:
Summary: Designing and assessing courses and curricula
Review: Book Review: Designing & Assessing Courses & Curricula by Ann Tomey

This book provides a model for designing, implementing, and evaluating courses and curricula from which the book has been organized. The first two chapters are the introduction. Chapters three through twelve describe the process, present research about teaching and learning, and identify excellent resources. Chapters three through five discuss deciding to begin, getting the process going, and the relationship of courses and curriculum. Chapters six and seven use case studies to illustrate the design process, ask appropriate questions, identify what data needs to be collected, and explore options. Chapters nine to twelve focuses on the course design, identification of instructional goals, development of assessment to measure accomplishment of the goals, decisions of how the course will be taught and usage of technology. Chapters thirteen and fourteen deal with communications between the teacher and the student and diversity. Chapter fifteen is about course and curriculum evaluation. Chapter sixteen outlines the characteristics of successful innovation. This 81/2 by 11inch book has large print, bolded divisions, bulleted and numbered lists, lots of diagrams and figures, and summaries at the end of most chapters. Resources, references, name and subject indexes are at the end of the book. This is a practical handbook for faculty and administrators.

Rating:
Summary: this is what it says - a practical guide
Review: I bought this book at a time when I felt that course design needed more structure than we traditionally gave it. I bought other related titles at the same time. However, this is the book that I found myself returning to each time I had to deal with some aspect of course design or evaluation. I have now moved on to working on overall quality of delivery in our college. Once again I found this book helped me out. It is what it claims to be - a practical guide to course design and evaluation.