Competing Imperatives

As I look over course materials and student evaluations from past semesters (and yes, even read reviews on the Site That Shall Not Be Named), and strive, while producing new and revised materials, to follow all the instructions that have arrived via email from various quarters,and take into account at least the more serious of the student suggestions, I’m finding myself torn between two completing imperatives:

--The provost, the dean, my program director, and various instructional “experts” want me to include more and more in my syllabi and assignments. At this part, substantial sections of the University and program web site and the university catalog are supposed to appear not only in their accustomed places, but also, often verbatim, in my syllabi. I understand the reason for these requests; even if (okay, even though) the students don’t read the syllabus, at least the information has clearly been made available to them, and that protects us in case of grade dispute, lawsuit, etc. I am resigned to this trend, and will follow instructions.

I’m less certain that I want to yield to another “instructional design” trend: including goals at the beginning of every darn assignment or activity, however small. That trend hasn’t really caught on at my school, but as assessment becomes more and more the order of the day (and as instructional designers have more influence on the design of online classes), I fear it will.

--The main complaint from the students, on the other hand, is that I’m throwing too many words at them, not only in official readings, but also in assignments, emails, etc. They want me to simplify, streamline, boil it down, preferably to something that will fit on a single smartphone screen, or maybe even in a text or tweet. Of course I’m inclined to resist this trend as well, since I’m pretty sure that, while it’s a good exercise to be able to epitomize the purpose of a completed paper or assignment in a sentence or two (and good practice to place that sentence in a prominent place in the finished product), complex thinking and writing can neither be explained nor accomplished in the bite-sized chunks so popular today. At the same time, I feel their pain; it’s frustrating to have to wade through seemingly endless repetitions of the same information to find what’s unique in any one document. And, of course, I’m aware that they’ll be evaluating me, and that, in many of their minds, “organized” and “clear” pretty much equate to “short bulleted list.”

Somewhere, I’m sure, there’s a happy medium (and if our LMS handled linked html documents better, and I had the time to create a series of intricately interlinked documents that avoided some of the repetition, I could probably come close(r) to it). For this semester at least, I’m afraid that verbosity and repetition are winning the contest.