I, Shelley, have been designing shared curriculum for the majority of my professional career. I was first hired as a specialist in teaching online first year writing courses. Within the first few years at the community college in which I worked, I was asked to design a course that would be shared with adjunct faculty. In this particular instance, the adjunct faculty were paid to attend two 90-minute onboarding sessions and then were allowed to adapt the curriculum in any way they saw fit. I learned two major considerations during this experience and I’m really excited about sharing them with you and I’m thrilled that I learned it early in my career. First, I figured during the sessions people would want to learn how to change things in the class. For example, if a quiz is attached to both the grade book and the calendar, how does someone change that if they changed a quiz? Instead, almost all of the questions were about the why. Why was the course designed this way? Why these assignments? Why these activities? Why this layout? Why this order?

The first lesson I learned was that instructors wanted to understand the why of the curriculum as a better way to understand how to deliver it. The second lesson I learned was that most of the adjunct instructors did not adapt the curriculum, at all. I even had one instructor who talked to me both at the end of the first semester and again two years later. She said that she would prefer to change the curriculum. However, she didn’t have the time to do so and therefore just continued to teach it as is. The second lesson, many of the instructors for whom we’re designing shared curriculum are extremely busy and appreciate and benefit from having someone do the course design and development for them.

Therefore, understanding lesson two, that our faculty, especially our adjuncts and increasingly our full-time faculty teaching focused instructors are very busy and unlikely to make major changes. It makes it even more imperative to follow lesson one, providing instructors with detailed understanding of why the course curriculum is designed in the manner it is. Obviously, it’s nice to do onboarding sessions, but if that can’t happen, a course instructor manual is a great place to start and we’ll be talking about that later in this course. The next lesson, lesson three, is home to the core theoretical principles we emphasize throughout this course: user-centered design and instructor autonomy.