My mom called me.
“Is summer school over?”
“Yep,” I said. Summer semester ended on August 14.
“That’s good. So you must be getting a break.”
“Nope!” Not even close.
This fall, I’m teaching three different courses: Service Design, Design for AI Products and Services, and Interaction Design Fundamentals. And all of those classes need to be prepared for, with varying degrees of effort.
Interaction Design Fundamentals is basically a brand-new course. I talked about its genesis before. But this summer is when those learning objectives we talked about a few months ago have to become an actual class with readings, lectures, and exercises. I’ve been helping out a little with this intermittently over the summer, suggesting readings (often straight from this list) and some exercises. This week I’ve been putting together one of the lectures on the History of Interaction Design and chipping in some pieces to the Principles and Laws of Interaction Design. I’ve frequently been plagiarizing my own books for some of those.
Building a course from scratch is a crazy amount of work. There are also five sections of this class with seven instructors, so keeping everything in sync and able to be taught by pretty much any of the faculty.
Thank goodness Design for AI Products and Services is fairly settled, structure- and content-wise (although as a fast-evolving field, there’s a lot new, including a new exercise). My co-faculty are on it and god bless them for it. I don’t know how I’d prep three classes otherwise.
Side note: No one should teach more than two different classes in a semester, and ideally not more than two classes a semester at all. Each class is 15-20 hours of work a week, once you factor in prep time, grading, office hours, and the class itself. Three classes push that to its max. Check out my fall schedule:
Those of you with corporate jobs might be saying, ehh, that’s not so bad, but remember Classes you are on. It’s a performance of sorts. It’s not like a meeting, unless it was a meeting you’re presenting at. And the non-class prep time is fairly high-level intellectual work. I have no idea how elementary and high school teachers, who teach six classes a day do it. And for less pay.
Service Design is a class that was bequeathed to me, so I’ve slowly been trying to make it my own, first by getting rid of the personas part of it, but now I’m adding a few other things into it as well, including a new book and some new case studies and an episode of The Bear. I did this because I felt we didn’t talk enough about Design and Services up front in the class, which is a lot of students’ first taste of both.
In order to make these seemingly minor tweaks required I blow up the schedule of the first half of the class. The second half of the class was blown up for me by Carnegie Mellon adding an extra day off on November 7th for Democracy Day. Now, I am totally for giving people the day off to vote. But the second half of this class is a project with a real client, and this class already has Thanksgiving in it and is tiiiight to produce something. The students basically get only six weeks in which to come up with a service design concept, then pitch it, then refine it. Tight.
So I’ve been spending a lot of time getting Service Design to simply work, structurally and sensically, without absolutely burning students into cinders. One example of this: trying to make a lot of the big deliverables due after a weekend to give them extra time to work on it. Some faculty don’t like this approach, saying we shouldn’t overload students on the weekend. I personally think it’s a mercy and takes advantage of their biggest block of time (Friday-Monday in this case). I’d be curious what students think of this.
The beginning of the semester is “a tidal wave” as one veteran professor described it. I’m working nights and weekends to prepare. So no, I’m not relaxed these two weeks, Mom. I’m stressed as hell.
Great post, I appreciate the references (both in the text as well as the actual list of references). Greetings from Montreal.