As both scholars and administrators, we keep returning to Ann Penrose’s (2012) publication on contingent labor, which argues that contingent faculty need three things to succeed: expertise, autonomy, and community. Shared curriculum — especially fully developed courses — can feel to individual instructors like it erases all three: their expertise goes unused, their autonomy shrinks, and they’re further disconnected from their unit or program’s teaching community. Designing with user-centered processes, and designing for instructor autonomy, helps restore all three.

User-Centered Design

A user-centered design process prompts curriculum designers to invite instructors to dialogue about their wants and needs of teaching shared curriculum. By engaging instructors in the design process, you send a clear message of “you are the one teaching this material, you are the expert in how it is delivered to students.” One way of creating this dialog between curriculum designers and instructors is setting up group feedback sessions.

We have collected instructor-as-user feedback through surveys and interviews, however, we both find that providing a group feedback session results in some of the most robust ideas because instructors build upon one another’s reflections and experiences. This works particularly well in larger and online programs as group feedback sessions provide the opportunity for community connection.

Below are some ideas of what feedback you might ask the instructors for:

1. Ask about what worked and why (with evidence) for both instructors and students.
2. Request narratives about what didn’t work (and brainstorm solutions) for both instructors and students.
3. Check on any changes that were made from the previous version and ask how they were received by the instructors and students.

This kind of feedback not only centers instructors as users, it also creates space for community in shared curriculum building that also encourages autonomy. It creates a feedback loop that improves the courses for all users and helps creators identify space for instructor autonomy v. pre-designed curriculum.

Instructor Autonomy

The instructor is the one doing the teaching and learning work with students. At minimum, they need the autonomy to adapt parts of a course to meet students’ needs, both as a group and individually. And even a less experienced instructor is an experienced learner with real expertise in the subject — otherwise they wouldn’t have been hired to teach it. Giving instructors room to adapt the curriculum, even something as small as adding examples in an announcement, acknowledges that expertise. As someone designing shared curriculum, this might look like:

• Articulating what can be changed without breaking the scaffolding
• Identifying where are the “you might/must contribute” examples
• Providing the ability to adjust rubrics and the gradebook items
• Outlining program policies that not only allow, but encourage instructors to accept late work and resubmissions
• Building out more than one major project or assessment option from which the instructor selects

Example of Shared Curriculum Support Materials for Instructor Autonomy

The beauty of a user-centered design model is that it easily produces support material inviting adaptation and autonomy for instructors using shared curriculum. Giving them clear descriptions of how and why the curriculum is designed — plus suggestions for where to add or adapt it — is worth the extra time and effort. For example, lesson plans are a common shared curriculum. Imagine, if a colleague offered to share a lesson plan that looks like this:

What are you supposed to do with that? This is a pretty drastic example; however, we have both taught with lesson plans this short.

Consider an alternative below. It is an examples with annotated comments for a new instructor or when a substitute needs to cover a class. This example, provides support for cryptic notes and shows instructors good places to inject themselves, encouraging instructor autonomy in a way that makes it easy, and palatable, for an instructor to adopt shared curriculum and adapt it for themselves.