5 steps of the University course development

Hi there! It’s Megi.

I’ve been a student and a university lecturer for 12 years. I had been curious for a very long time as a student before I got a chance to work on course development and methodologies about the general steps of the university marketing course creation. If you are considering an academic career, I have developed 5 steps that I would like to share with you.

1. First, it is important to remember which university you work for. You need to learn their overall strategy, views, and developed plans for the courses. It is important because it clarifies for you what kind of courses you would like to develop and teach - based on the levels of the strictness of the university plans, you will be either assigned to the particular course close to your specialization, or you will be free to create your own course.

2. To move forward, you need to organize and structure your course plan. If you teach in a team of lecturers, you should clarify your parts of the course and their interconnection with other parts delivered by your colleagues. If you teach as a solo lecturer, you should clarify the sequence of course topics, home tasks, graded assignments, and exams. I pay attention to making the course as relevant to the market as possible - I go through the vacancy sites to determine the needs of the potential employers in relation to their potential employees - my students. For example, when developing the course on Marketing Analytics, I used the keyword “marketing analyst” on the vacancies’ websites to determine the qualifications required for the position. Hence, in addition to the theoretical foundations in the course, I added the applicable topics of SQL, R or Python, Google Analytics, and so on.

3. The plan allowed me to collect terms, frameworks, and recent examples to prepare the presentations and develop applicable homework and in-class activities. Moreover, it is essential to run the timings to understand each class pace. Along with the development, it is vital to consider the levels of the students you are teaching to determine the depth of the explanations: 1st year Bachelor students and 2nd year Master students certainly are not the same. In addition, it is important to learn about the number of people in your classes and if there is a need to make certain adjustments for students with disabilities. For me, as a lecturer, it is crucial to ensure the safety and comfort of everyone involved in the classes.

4. The development of the set of home tasks and course activities requires paying attention to the course format - whether it is online or offline - the methodologies are different, and the levels of interactivity and student involvement are determined based on the formats. Moreover, it is possible to invite the practitioners and specialists to share their practical experience concerning the particular topic.

5. It is useful to have a short survey at the beginning of the course to learn more about the expectations of the students about the course and their levels of knowledge on the topic. Then, it is compared to the course outcomes in terms of the initial expectations by the end of the course. The feedback collection at the end of the course can be either before the last class to have time to address the potential questions, disappointments, or lacking topics or after the course when you receive either the grade for the course or the grade along with the feedback.

Of course, each lecturer determines their own approach to course development, the depth of the explanation of terms, the recency of examples and their applicability, the dedication to proper feedback provision to the tasks, and to making the course interesting. Nevertheless, this is my experience, and hopefully, it was interesting for you. Additionally, the approaches to course development for university and corporate purposes are different, but the core ideas are similar.

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