A course design workshop as a possible path from a content-centered to a learning-centered teaching

Abstract

In order to meet the needs of a constantly changing Society, the Universities need to constantly improve their processes of teaching and learning. To do so, it is essential that professors are fully committed and well prepared to teach aiming at students learning, instead of content delivery. Faculty development programs might be helpful to support the institution and the professors in this way. Since designing these programs is a challenging task, we intend to contribute with faculty developers by reporting our experience here. We have adapted a course design workshop developed at McGill University to our context at PUCPR, in Curitiba, South of Brazil. During the workshop, the participants had to write a new syllabus of their course, elaborate a concept map, both of them with only the essential aspects for learning. They had to define the learning outcomes and only afterwards to choose active methods to help students achieve them. Throughout the whole process, participants gave feedback to each other. The activities of the workshop, along with the fruitful discussions among professors of different backgrounds helped professors to view the content as something that supports the development of learning outcomes. Therefore, we conclude that this workshop has opened the way to methodological innovations that develop learning of higher cognitive dimensions, since the professor has established more challenging expectations for the students when writing the new teaching plan.