Politixia
If college professors like me don’t tell our students what the purpose of our assignments is, they will keep using AI in every possible way to sail through them with minimal resistance.
If we don’t tell students the purpose of the courses we offer, they will focus on the ones that most align with short-term employability and will overlook ones that set them up for long-term career success and ones that enrich them in ways beyond the financial.
If we don’t do a better job telling the public and policy makers the purpose of higher education, we may not have jobs in higher education much longer.
For too long, we have coasted on a tacit view that all learning is good and that everything we do in a college classroom counts as learning. That this nearly religious faith in the educator wasn’t questioned more forcefully earlier has been a luxury — one that, dare I say it, has allowed us to get lazy in our teaching and inept in our public communication. We need to do better, for ourselves and our students and our stakeholders. It’s a shame that we haven’t already done so.
A confluence of sociopolitical and technological forces — Trump and AI, if you need concrete names, but it really does go much deeper than that — is pushing us to the brink and forcing us to finally confront this issue. Even if you revile these disruptive forces and lament the collateral damage they are needlessly causing, as I do, I believe we will come out of this disruptive era for the better. And I believe the way to do that is to be radically honest with ourselves, our students, and the public we serve about every aspect of our craft — from the exercises we assign and the topics we teach to the courses and majors we offer.
That’s a tall order. But there’s a convenient technique that helps immensely: backward design.
Imagine you’re a math professor prepping a calculus course for next semester, and amazingly your chair gives you free rein to teach it however you wish. It’s tempting to start by listing the topics you want to cover: integrals, volume calculations, trig substitution, all that stuff. Then come the assignments that drill in this material and assess mastery of it: homework problems practicing the techniques from lecture, midterm problems that mimic those homework problems. The course ends with a final exam ensuring the students learned what they were supposed to.
All good, right? No.
This way of building a course fails to address the most burning question: Why are the students made to learn this material in the first place? You may have an answer to that in mind, but where is it communicated clearly to the student? And maybe you don’t have an answer other than that students have to learn this stuff because that’s what calculus is — and they have to learn calculus because students have always had to learn calculus.
Without conveying the purpose of the course to your students, they will assume the purpose is to get a good grade on the assignments. And they will recognize that the way to do this is often to use as much AI as possible, even if doing so short-circuits the genuine learning you were hoping to achieve.
Backward course design is a wonderfully simple yet effective alternative approach. It has roots dating back to 1949 but is mostly attributed to the 1988 book “Understanding by Design,” authored by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. Instead of starting with content and then building assessments around it, start from the very end of the course and work backward. And by the end of the course I don’t mean the final exam — I mean the things you want your students to walk out of your classroom at the end of the semester knowing or being able to do. These are the course goals.
Next, build assessments that push students toward these goals and measure whether they have adequately achieved them. The choice of content is the final stage of course design rather than the beginning of the process, because now your task is to find the material that will best lead your students toward a strong performance on the assessments.
Keeping with the example of a calculus class, if your goal is, say, for your students to be able to manually solve a range of integration problems, relying on a range of techniques such as trig substitution, then you’re not thinking hard enough about your job. Computers can flawlessly do this stuff much faster, and you have not convinced your students — perhaps not even yourself — that there’s any real value in learning how to do it by hand.
I’d much rather declare that one goal is to have students understand that for centuries humanity was stumped by the seemingly impossible problem of calculating volumes and then a brilliant solution was discovered in the 1600s — one that reshaped society and is still used today in everything from finance to medicine to training AI. Another goal is to understand how this marvelous mathematical idea works and is done, both by hand and by computer. And a perfectly reasonable goal is to sharpen the mind.
But whatever the goals are, we have to tell them to our students. They will be more motivated and less inclined to do what you might consider cheating (and which likely seems to them merely as working efficiently). And by being upfront with yourself about these goals, you’ll be more likely to build an effective course that prepares students for the world we inhabit today, rather than clinging to tradition even as it hurtles us into irrelevance.
Backward design needn’t end with course planning. We should take it into all aspects of higher ed administration. By this I mean that we should put more effort into discussing and defining the role of a college education. What do we hope our students graduate knowing and being able to do? What impact do we hope to have on our students’ lives? And on the communities we are part of, and the nation and global community more broadly?
Answering these difficult but important questions will allow us to better articulate how our majors and degree programs are oriented toward these goals and how our courses fit into these majors.
Working backward from our goals, in the classroom and across campus more broadly, will force us to be more mindful of everything we do. And it will help us better communicate what we’re doing — and why we’re doing it — to those who are rightly questioning our methods and our contribution to society.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings