Increasing numbers of FAS courses are designed to build toward a final or capstone project. These projects are usually shared with classmates and a Harvard audience through fairs, screenings, exhibits, or other types of public events at the end of the semester. Notable examples include Computer Science 50, the General Education courses Science & Cooking and Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History, and several courses taught by East Asian Languages and Civilizations Prof. Hisa Kuriyama, which include multimedia final projects.
A frequent question from instructors is how to showcase these final projects on a public website in a visually appealing manner to a broader audience. Another motivation for such a website is to provide examples to current and prospective students.
The Bok Center for Teaching and Learning found an elegant solution for their Designing the Course of the Future (DCF) seminar, which was a flagship component of the Bok Center Teaching Certificate Program for Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students at Harvard.
In this course, taught by Bok Center staff member John Girash and colleagues four times from 2011 to 2014, graduate students from disciplines across GSAS and several other Harvard schools learned about course design best practices and latest developments in the science of teaching and learning. Students designed their own courses, using innovative pedagogy and/or novel content to teach fundamental concepts and skills. Each year, the course culminated in a “Syllabus Fair” poster session where students presented their course designs to a large Harvard audience. Many of these courses have since been offered to students at Harvard and elsewhere.
To create an appealing online “syllabus gallery,” the instructors used the Beta Blogs at Harvard WordPress service along with a customized version of its Tetris theme, to upload students’ syllabi and accompanying materials. Many posts were augmented by visuals to emphasize the “gallery” look on the home page. In addition, posts were tagged with keywords, including year and discipline, which made the whole site easily browsable. Overall, the site has been a success and should inspire other courses and instructors seeking to showcase their students’ final projects on a public website.
To learn more about the DCF Syllabus Gallery visit: http://beta.blogs.harvard.edu/bokdcf/