T5: Structuring Your Course

I have created this book so you can structure your course to meet your and your students’ needs. Pick and choose from the concepts and exercises. Build a portfolio as you go along or do not. Create your own exercises and concepts.

This book is appropriate for students with fundamental technical skills. It was initially produced for college and older high school students with some adaptability skills. You can and should teach adaptability to younger children or adult learners with little to no technical skills. However, you may need to start with more basic exercises than I provide. For example, you might want to create exercises on how to search the web, how to change the background on a phone, or how to find a YouTube video.

Inexperienced Students

If you have students with some technical knowledge – they can use phones, use MS Word as a word processor, and search the web – I suggest you match the concept with the exercises in the same order and ignore the portfolio completely. I have tried to match the concepts to relevant exercises; however, they do not always complement each other. Both the exercises and concepts are provided in order of increasing complexity.

Intermediate Students

If your students have fundamental technical knowledge, they can take on more significant challenges. Therefore, you may want to leave out some basic exercises and focus on the more complex ones.

I primarily teach technical communication and UX students at the sophomore college level and above. I often have communication, visual arts, media, and computer programming students. Since this class is online, I use journals to gauge the students’ mindsets, a necessity since I cannot see how they are reacting. Additionally, we usability test their portfolios. I focus more on the concepts at the beginning of the semester and the exercises and portfolio later. Here is my schedule for a 16-week semester:

Only whole courses?

You may not want a whole course on adaptability. Just adding a unit on adaptability will help someone be more adaptable. You may wish to add adaptability elements to a rote exercise. For instance, challenge students to find a solution when you do not provide that information. You might require students to learn a new technology independently when you teach a technology-related subject such as design. Any adaptability practice will help an individual adjust to new technologies.