Abstract:

Is it possible to have a quick and efficient course design and teaching, with maintained pedagogical quality? Our case study of the Design Fiction university course from 2020 show that it is possible, and we suggest a number of guidelines, as well as cautionary warnings.

When the covid-19 pandemic caused a minor and partial lockdown in Sweden, the government feared that unemployment would increase. A common strategy in Sweden to mitigate high unemployment is to be progressive about increasing university education, and the same strategy was initiated approaching the summer of 2020. All Swedish universities were offered increased funding to deliver summer courses, a request that trickled down to our own division Interaction Design, at Chalmers University of Technology, in Gothenburg, Sweden. The request was to offer a summer course for about 25 students, but with the challenge that it needed to start in three weeks. A group of four teachers said yes, and we decided on the topic of Design Fiction, since we saw a good opportunity to connect the course closely to our research, for the benefit of both ourselves and our students.

We managed to complete the course (syllabus, content, structure, and all assignments) in the given three weeks, and when the course ended in late August 2020, we had a completion rate of about 80% and a highly positive course evaluation. How was this possible? We took much inspiration from another course I have been developing and running for almost 20 years, the Digital Movie Making university course. During the years this course have been finetuned to be both successful and efficient, and we took much of that course design as a blueprint for the new Design Fiction course.

These are the most important take aways, and our tentative suggestions for efficient and successful course design under high time pressure.
- Use an existing course as template for overall structure.
- Don’t spend time on meetings. Instead, have an examiner with the mandate and support to take quick and dictatorial decisions.
- Use a teacher’s team where all teacher’s know each other.
- Make extensive use of highly skilled teaching assistant (TA), for both supervision and part of the grading.
- Be a curator of content, not a producer. We did record a few lecture videos, but to a very large extent we relied on video and text from other academics.
- Avoid spending time on grading, instead focus on feedback. Use only approved/not approved.
- Rely on students to facilitate their own seminars (we had one TA that supervised a set of several parallel seminar groups).
- Use Slack or similar well-designed text-based forum for all communication.

Finally, a few words of warning. We are highly aware of the need for thoughtful reflection in higher education. However, it is primarily the students that should be reflective over the course topic, and maybe not always teachers that should dwell extensively over course structure. We are also aware that different teachers work at very different pace. The breakneck course development worked well for the four of us, but we know that it would not fit all of our teacher colleagues. Also, we were lucky with many parts of the course, not the least that we managed to hire two very professional TA. Also, during the short three-week development period we didn’t run into any disagreements among the teachers. Had we not been lucky in these regards, we might have very well failed instead!

Keywords:

Course development, quality, efficient, resources.