The class I’m solo teaching this summer is Service Design, one of the classes I co-taught this past spring. The class starts literally right after graduation weekend, so this week I’ve been working on creating the syllabus, assignments, and readings. Practically, this mostly means wrestling with Canvas, copying the Spring class to the new summer class.
This would be a simple matter except for one major issue: summer semester is shorter than spring (and fall) semesters by two weeks. Additionally, my class meets Mondays and Wednesdays, and there are two Mondays we have off (Memorial Day and Juneteenth). So I had to figure out how to deliver the same amount of learning in a shorter amount of time (without burning out students) and making sure there’s still a lot of hands-on exercises because it’s a design class after all. And then, because Canvas makes you do everything manually, go about changing all the dates and texts everywhere. It’s detailed work and time-consuming.
I’m mostly keeping the lesson plan exactly the same with one exception. In Spring, we did a whole lecture on personas. I did a Twitter poll to see who was still using personas in their practice. Less than 50% said they did. One respondent went so far as to say that personas were cringe. My follow-up question was what they used instead and the Jobs To Be Done framework was the winner here, which is something we used when I was at Twitter, so I’m making a new lecture and readings on JTBD in place of personas.
It’s good I’m getting this experience in the summer with just one class. In the fall, I’ll have three classes to wrangle.
I can relate to having to change all the dates in Canvas manually. One of my colleagues introduced me to this tool (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Higher-Ed-Canvas-Users/Adjust-All-Assignment-Dates-on-One-Page/ba-p/263117) which lets you edit all of the due dates on one page through a Google Sheet. The setup isn't the most intuitive, but I thought I'd share it in case it's helpful.
So what resources will you be using to teach JTBD? Any books or other materials you’d recommend in particular? (Greetings from TU Delft in The Netherlands.)