Chapter 1 Redesigning the Upper-Division Courses
An on-going effort during the 2016-2017 academic year involved incorporating the agreed upon changes into the upper-division curriculum. In order to create more flexibility in the major and to make room for new specialty courses based on the research expertise of the current faculty, several courses had been eliminated. These included the modern physics course, the second quarter of the electronics course, the Reference Frames paradigms in physics course, and the mathematics methods and classical mechanics capstone courses. The most important content of each of these courses needed to be integrated into the redesigned junior-level paradigms in physics courses and into the two new sophomore courses. Redesign of the junior-level paradigms in physics courses also included implementing the shift from three three-week courses each term to two five-week courses each term, with just-in-time mathematics instruction, known as math bits, integrated into all of the courses.
All of these paradigms in physics courses continued the format of meeting daily, for one hour on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Class sessions occurred in the department's “studio” classroom (http://scaleup.ncsu.edu), in which students sat in groups at eight large circular tables, with a computer available for every three students. Large screens on the walls projected what the instructor was writing on three wall-sized white boards as well as resources from the Internet that the instructor chose to access. An open area in the middle of the room provided space for demonstrations and large group interactive engagement activities. Both large and small whiteboards were available for students to use in small groups or individually at their tables. Students also could work on homework together in a separate room dedicated to upper-division students. A teaching assistant also held office hours and the instructor welcomed student questions both inside and outside of class.
All faculty members teaching the redesigned courses were familiar with the courses and willing to make the changes approved. Members of the Paradigms 2.0 committee were teaching four of the six courses and were intimately acquainted with the approved changes; one of the committee members had recently taught the fifth course and had been mentoring the faculty member currently teaching the course. This faculty member would be teaching the course for the second time. The faculty member teaching the sixth course had taught it before and had had direct input into the committee's deliberations the previous spring.
During Fall 2016, the old lineup of three three-week courses remained the official schedule because the spring vote had occurred well after the students had had to register for their fall courses. The faculty intended, however, to teach these three official three-week courses according to the new plan, as two five-week courses. This created an unexpected challenge in that a graduate student from another department had registered for the middle three-week course without realizing that it was now part of a five-week course starting at the beginning of the term. Also several physics majors wanted to repeat the second course but not the first.
Other than such surprises, however, the fall term went well. The first faculty member succeeded in creating one five-week course out of the first two three-week courses, both with primarily electromagnetism content. Previously different faculty members had taught these two courses but parts had been interchanged so there was precedent for a new creative rearrangement. In an interview about teaching the new five-week version, the current faculty member expressed appreciation for the extra time beyond three weeks to get to know the students better. The second faculty member fall term successfully created a five-week course out of a three-week course that already had had an additional one-week mathematics preface (the tenth week in a ten-week term). The additional fifth week allowed for more introductory content and slower pacing for absorbing the complexities of thermodynamics and an introduction to statistical mechanics. Both faculty members collaborated with a third who was implementing the new plan to integrate math bits into all the junior-year paradigms in physics courses as discussed in the next section.
During Winter 2017, the new plan was finally implemented officially in two five-week courses. The first course was relatively unchanged, based on a quantum mechanics textbook by the faculty member who had originated the course two decades earlier. The additional time available allowed for some additional physics as well as mathematics content. The faculty member designing and teaching the second course winter term combined a previous three-week course on oscillations with related content from another course on waves. The longer course allowed a better pacing for students in doing and writing about the integrated laboratories that previously had been in these separate courses.
During Spring 2017, the faculty member designing and teaching the first five-week course was combining material from a three-week course on periodic systems and another part of the prior course on waves. During an interview, this faculty member discussed the challenge of redesigning courses taught through activities and discussions rather than through lectures based on textbooks. With revisions of courses based on textbooks, one could just specify which chapters the new course was to cover. In combining courses based on interactive engagement strategies, however, this faculty member drew on the already existing course materials documented in the paradigms wiki (http://physics.oregonstate.edu/portfolioswiki/) and prior versions of the course websites:
Putting it together, I looked at the old websites and the wiki for information about what problems existed and what activities does one do and started out actually by just setting up my set of homework problems... and I tried to order the homework in a reasonable way with the new content, and that helped me to put together a schedule, trying to figure out how many days I thought it would take to cover enough content so students could do these homeworks...
After setting up the homework schedule, this faculty member next decided on the in-class activities:
I started copying over activities onto my course website from the wiki and by copying over I really mean sort of paraphrasing, because...I think it's valuable making all of my notes for myself and my plans for the class...available on my course website... so I would copy over activity plans, whatever I think I want students to see, and try to slot that into my schedule, trying to figure out how much content I needed to prepare...once I copied things over, then I had lots of gaps...I end up writing my own lectures...
This faculty member defined “lecture” as “any time in which I am writing something planned on the board” but noted:
...In many cases my lectures were talking through what students had already attempted or had done, so we would do an activity, and particularly if I didn't always plan things time-wise well, ...sometimes they wouldn't finish an activity by end of class...then the next day I would give them a little lecture in which I talked through “yesterday you did such and such and you found this, and some of you got this far and then you...” which I think is effective because if they have already done it, then it reminds them, it will click in their heads; if they didn't get it done, then they have strong interest and motivation in understanding me and they might have some idea of where they got stuck and what they failed to do, which can lead to good questions.
This process enabled this faculty member to create a combined five-week course that built upon the homework and interactive engagement strategies that had been well-tested through the previous versions of the original paradigms in physics courses.
The faculty member redesigning and teaching the second five-week spring course on central forces had taught it many times before. Changes to be made included some additional mathematical methods that had previously been taught in the separate but now eliminated math methods capstone course.