Section 2.1 Shifting from three-week to five-week courses
¶The decision two decades earlier in 1996 had been to take two 3-credit courses meeting separately for an hour, each three times a week, for a total of six credits each term and to combine them into a series of three 2-credit courses, each meeting daily for three weeks, for one hour Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for a total of six credits each term. The number of credits each term was the same, six. Instead of taking two courses addressing different physics topics and meeting separately for an entire term, with little if any coordination between the instructors, the students would experience a series of three intense coherent experiences in learning physics daily for three weeks each during a term. As reported in section 3.8 of Part V, after nearly two decades of offering three 2-credit paradigms in physics courses each term, the faculty had voted in 2016 to shift from these three 2-credit three-week junior-level paradigms in physics courses meeting daily each term to two 3-credit five-week courses meeting daily, for a total of six credits each term.
“Everybody seems quite happy with the five-week paradigms,” summarizes the perspectives of the faculty interviewed. One elaborated on the limits of this common perception:
The five-week courses have gone well, I would say. We haven't run into difficulties that we knew of with the five-week transition; we haven't heard about difficulties, and the students report - well the challenge here is that no students took both the three-weeks and the five-weeks (courses) but the students who took five-weeks (courses) say they wouldn't want to go back to three weeks, so they're happy with it.
The extra two weeks in all junior-level paradigms in physics courses now included the Math Bits just-in-time mathematics instruction, adapted from the eliminated mathematics methods capstone course. Students heading to graduate school could access advanced content drawn from the old course by enrolling in the early graduate-level version of that course. The two new sophomore courses also absorbed some of the content eliminated from the junior-level paradigms in physics courses as well as from the eliminated modern physics course. The extra two weeks allowed for a slower pace and provided a longer time within a course for students to absorb the content well in the redesigned junior-level paradigms courses. Faculty members also appreciated the extra time to get to know the students.