One of my tasks this semester is to plan for a reading course. A reading course is a student-designed course, consisting of identifying a topic, creating a list of learning objectives, creating assignments that demonstrate and reinforce those objectives, finding source materials that will teach the objectives along with modalities to import the information from the materials into the brain, and a syllabus that outlines timelines and deliverables. Once I’ve created all that, it gets submitted to the department coordinator for review and approval, and then I’m paired with a professor to manage the administrative side and evaluate the assignments.
Basically, it’s paying the university to count my self-learning as credit.
That might seem like a waste of resources. “Isn’t the point of a university that you get to offload all of the course creation, and you have an expert teaching you the material?” My answer to that is the university can be thought of as a context that facilitates learning. I have access to professors that I can ask questions of, a thoroughly stocked library with reference librarians to help with my research, and an academic mindset fostered by my other classes, my classmate peers, and the lack of employment distraction.
Also, I’m attending university with the goal of learning the material that is interesting to me and will support my future goals. Some of the topics I want to explore more deeply don’t have broad enough student appeal to win a spot on the official list of courses, simply because not enough students would enrol in them. I have a lot of topics that fall into that category. While I can’t create reading courses for all of them, I can create one, possibly two.
Of course, designing such a reading course is only the first step. After that I have to follow the plan I’ve laid out for myself. And just as it’s difficult to design a course for a subject you don’t know much about yet, it’s also difficult to follow a plan designed that way. I might have made assumptions during the course design that don’t survive contact with the material. I may have to change the definition of an assignment mid-semester. Having a professor on hand to help me work through those bumps in the road will be helpful, but ultimately I’ll be responsible for managing that uncertainty.
That sounds like more work, and it is. But it’s also an opportunity to practice many of the research skills I’ve been learning in this program. Eventually I’ll leave the sheltered cove of the courses designed by the faculty here and strike out on my own, for employment or research, and in both cases I’m likely to be moving forward into unknown territory where there is no syllabus to guide me. Being able to practice those exploratory skills with the safety net of a faculty advisor is an educational opportunity not found in a typical lecture-based class. I think it will be a good fit for my learning style and my post-program goals.
I have to submit the reading course proposal by the end of this semester, so I have about 3 months to get it done. If all goes well, I’ll be enrolling in my own course this fall. I’ll be sure to share what I learn along the way!