Building Lesson Plans for Twenty-First-Century Active Learning

Abstract

When we initially created and refined the first-year Cornerstone courses at Minerva, we evolved a set of shared processes, conventions, and templates to support the process of developing lesson plans for active learning. After devoting two full years of curriculum design effort exclusively to these four courses, we faced the challenge of scaling our course development process to simultaneously design a much larger number of upper-division courses. In order to consistently and efficiently create extraordinary active learning experiences, we started to develop a software-based lesson plan authoring tool that would encapsulate and codify our previously-validated templates and processes. This tool, Course Builder, grew to also support the management and iterative improvement of our full curriculum. By the end of its first semester in use, the combined functionality of Course Builder and the Active Learning Forum allowed us to move beyond the need for a Learning Management System entirely. In this chapter, we introduce the Course Builder curriculum design system. We take a close look at how this technology allows us to collaboratively design, systematically coordinate, and iteratively improve on courses and lesson plans built specifically for active learning.