Description
Learn
Techniques and Activities to help you explore this practice.
Student-Defined Coursework
Leave parts of your course schedule/syllabus blank, and plan to invite students to help define that work. You may also build assignments around the work they choose: have students lead class discussions (online or in person), find/curate readings and resources, define the best assessment methods or grading approaches, pick the technology tools they think would work best, etc.
Student-Determined Coursework
Identify multiple assignments or projects that can meet a particular goal of your course. Let students choose the assignments they wish to complete in order to demonstrate their learning. Think about offering variety in final product (video, Web site, presentation, written paper, etc.) or in aspects of a topic/ theme/ focus. Present students with a “menu” of engagement options and accept suggestions they might have to expand your menu.
Student-Designed Courses
Keep your design/plan for your course wide open. Spend the first few weeks working with your students to lay out a plan for your course. What topics do they want to learn more about? What kinds of work do they want to do? What will participation in the course look like? How do they want to work with each other? How do they want to be graded/assessed for their work? How will they hold themselves and their classmates accountable?
You can help guide this conversation to ensure that critical topics, issues, or work is covered, but provide as much freedom as possible to your students, encouraging them to see the course as a co-created experience between themselves and you.
Student-Designed Module
Interested in blending this practice with Modular Based Scheduling? Consider turning over certain modules in your course to students — let them define the scope of the module, the activities/assessments, and the learning materials.
Rework an Assignment to Make it Choice-Friendly
Choose an existing assignment you’ve used in a class successfully. A larger assignment, project, or presentation will probably be best. Rework it using the following questions as your guide:
- What alternative product(s) could a student create for this assignment that you haven’t used before?
- How could you take the focus of your existing assignment and reframe it so that students can choose their own focus?
- Can you assess this assignment differently and plan for conversations with your class about what assessment/grading approach would work best?
- Can you propose a range of technology tools (or kinds of technology tools) that would work and leave the final choice up to your students?
Explore
Online reading and resources to help dive deeper into this practice.
- Opening the Classroom: Ownership & Engagement, Ben Van Overmeire
- Learning to Let Go: Listening to Students in Discussion, Chris Friend
- Thoughts on Student Agency, Karen Cangilaosi
- Collaborative Syllabus Design: Students at the Center, Amy Nelson
Related Slipper-Camp Resources
Check out these PSU-specific resources generated by this spring's Slipper Camp.
Engage
A larger community of teachers and learners interested in this practice.
Discuss on Twitter
If you are active on Twitter, we encourage you to share your thought and ideas using the #ACEFramework hashtag and the #studentchoice hashtag to talk about this practice, in particular.
Join a Meeting
If you are interested in talking to people about the Adaptability value (for which Flexible Deadlines is an ACE-informed practice), we invite you to our hosted Zoom chats. Chats are scheduled this summer on the following dates:
- Thursday, June 18 from 1:00PM-2:00PM (EDT): Overview of the ACE Framework
- Thursday, June 25 from 1:00PM-2:00PM (EDT): Adaptability Practices
Submit Your Ideas
If you find yourself working this summer on a project or approach that uses Student Design and Choice, we invite you to share what you’ve found or created, via the Submit Something button below. If you choose to publicly share your submission, it will immediately become available on this page in the Revisit section. (For particularly compelling submissions, we may also add this to the Explore section of this page.)
Hypothesize with Us
The online annotation tool, Hypothesis, is built into this Web site. Feel free to annotate this (or any page in the ACE Framework) with your own thoughts, critiques, questions, or ideas. You can easily get started with a Hypothesis account (which is free) and learn more about how to use the tool.
Join Our Team
Plymouth State University community members are invited to join our Teams site for the ACE Framework. Feel free to use our discussion channel to ask questions, give suggestions, and point to new resources.
Revisit
A space for user-submitted ideas, resources, and links related to this practice.
Student choice in assessment product
- Submitted by: Lynne Bates
- Submitted on: July 22, 2020
- Submitted File: Current event news article
- Students are asked to find a current event article [news article] that is somehow related to either some disease, safety or environmental topic through the lens of the “average consumer” rather than a researcher. (pretty broad, I know) The original assignment had students presenting their news article to the class. This semester I have decided to give the students the choice of how they will present the information to their peers. They can choose to lead a class discussion around the article writing and posting a reflection on this process, they can write and submit a blog post, create and post a Vlog, create and post a one-pager. These will then be used to facilitate discussions throughout the semester.
Students learning goals shape how they interact with course material
- Submitted by: Kayla Gaudette
- Submitted on: July 19, 2020
- Submitted File: TWP Journal 1_Your Goals Shape Your Lens
- I will be incorporating a journal entry and 1:1 zoom check in for my Tackling a Wicked Problem course to capture students learning goals for the semester and how that goal will shape their interaction with our course material (Overmeire, 2020). For example, if a student is mostly interested in how pandemics impact higher education they could keep a diary about their educational experience through a pandemic and connect all course concepts to the impact of or on higher education in relation to pandemics. Maybe a student is interested in the medias influence during a pandemic; they could focus their interaction with the course material on global relations, policy, and dissecting current events to determine fact from fiction. I’ve attached a draft of the journal prompt below, it needs reworking and I am open to suggestion!
student design
- Submitted by: Eun-Ho Yeo
- Submitted on: July 17, 2020
- I tried to modify an “open project” in which students plan, execute, and evaluate their work in my Communication Theory class. It is something similar to a project assignment in my class during fall 2019. The project started with a very simple statement: The final project is literally “Open” to any ideas as long as your final outcome shows the following: 1. Theory related 2. Real life connection 3. Level of sophistication (academic depth) Then students chose whom to work with, what to work on, how to work on. The deadline was set as “before the final presentation.” The students were asked to provide a self made rubric and use it for their self grading report. Students were asked to provide “progress reports” in an open forum regularly I could modify it as an online individual version
Let students come up with their own project
- Submitted by: Zhizhang Shen
- Submitted on: July 16, 2020
- Submitted Link: CS3600 Database design project page
- It does make sense to let students design their own work, to further enrich their learning experience in some cases. I have a capstone project built into my CS3600 Database design, where a group of students will tackle a project, focused on certain application. Considering the fact that some students might have their own application, I just added Section 2.7 in the project assignment page to let them create their own project.
Script Analysis Style – Choice-Friendly
- Submitted by: Paul Mroczka
- Submitted on: July 15, 2020
- Submitted File: Script Analysis Choice-Friendly
- Traditionally, Script Analysis has focused on preparing learners to analyze a full-length play, which is done through a very lengthy final project. In fall 2019, after receiving some suggestions from our seniors during their Exit Interviews, I decided to change the format of a class. I started to transform it from a class where students were taught various analytical techniques and tools and sent off to do their midterm analysis and final project (the complete analysis of a full-length play) to one where we workshopped each element that would comprise their final analysis. Overall, it proved to be more active, very collaborative, and anxiety-relieving. The development of actual modules as well as the inclusion of choice-friendly assignments are some of the next steps I’m taking to reenvision the course.
