Curriculum Keeping Up with the Times

College courses will always require adjustments to stay relevant to what students and employers need, according to Jenny Aune, the director of Advanced Communication courses in the Department of English. As the person responsible for upper-level communication courses, such as business and technical communication, Aune oversees efforts to change these courses to better match today’s demands. Over time, her efforts have developed into a cohesive strategy for keeping up to date.

This strategy often takes one of two forms, the first is what Aune refers to as “ripples.” These ripples start, as Jenny describes, when “faculty, curriculum committees… reading research, secondary articles” come across a new need for classes. This need may involve changing something in a class to provide a particular new skill set or method of critical thinking. Maybe a new learning goal needs to be implemented in an activity. Maybe an assignment needs to focus more on a specific aspect of writing. Maybe, in more major shifts, an assignment needs to move to a different part of the course schedule so that students can develop the skills for it earlier in the course.

Whatever the need, Aune encourages instructors to share their ideas and how they would like to implement them in their own sections of a course the next semester. Based on the results of the trial in one class, the change may be adjusted and tested across a few semesters before it is officially implemented in the curriculum affecting all courses, or it might be implemented right away. “We’re trying to update the assignments and keep them fresh,” Aune explains. With the help of these ripples, the Advanced Communication courses are constantly adjusting according to demand.

The second form of this strategy for keeping up to date is called a refresh, which is, as Aune puts it, “more substantive.… Those would be instructors going back to their lesson plans and needing to change things.” The refresh, developed over the summer by a team of advanced communication instructors, comes as a major change to one specific class. The 2024 refresh, for example, removed an assignment from English 3020 in favor of expanding on a different, more complex assignment because the former was a more routine task that could be completed adequately with help from a large language model (LLM). This change shifted the priorities of that class to better match what today’s students need.

Each refresh is a process of brainstorming, deliberating, and editing designed to go along with industry and technology changes and better accommodate students. The hot topic in recent years has been LLMs and how teaching changes because of their availability for students to use in their writing. Aune expresses that “one of the difficulties that we’re facing with large language models is students offloading too much critical thinking to them. What we’re getting is more bland, general, ineffective communication.” Recent ripples and refreshes, then, have attempted to adapt assignments to a particular class and to change assignment rubrics to avoid their being fed into an LLM. Aune states that the focus on critical thinking has “always been there, but it’s on the forefront right now.” The team hopes that by addressing this specific instance of a modern advancement, their teaching can further adapt to new technologies and higher standards for communication as a whole.

Aune herself takes a step back from these processes, claiming that they are “only successful because of the faculty.” Through it all, the strategy for change is designed to allow more grassroots experimentation because new ideas to match a changing world are necessary to prepare students for the workplace.