R E S E A R C H AND T E A C H I N GWhat Does Course Design
Mean to College Science andMathematics Teachers?
By Gary A. Smith, Audriana Stark, and Julie Sanchez

A phenomenographic study ata research university identified
five categories of description for
how STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics)
instructors conceptualize the design
and redesign of undergraduate
courses. These categories form ahierarchical outcomes space withincreasing complexity of awarenessof the phenomenon. The basic
conceptualization (Category 1) is
individual focus on the content toteach. Another focus turns to how toteach the content (Category 2).
In Category 3, course design
involves critical reflection that
informs adjusting what is taught
and how it is taught. Category 4
extends course design fromindividuals to collaborative activity
within a department. In Category 5,
instructors’ course-design lens
expands beyond a department toembrace collective engagementwith people across disciplines anduniversities to develop a culture
to innovate teaching and learning.
The study shows that instructors,
administrators, and faculty
developers should view course
design not only as a variety of
individual approaches, but also asopportunities to stimulate networks
to enhance the design process andits impact.

T

he national call for increasing
the graduation of STEM (science, technology, engineering,and mathematics) majors (National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2010; President’s
Council of Advisors on Scienceand Technology, 2012) stimulated
research and reform focused onundergraduate STEM instruction(National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine, 2015,2017; National Research Council,2012). In turn, higher education institutions use the emerging researchand calls to action to drive redesignof STEM courses and curricula (Association of American Universities,
2017; Dolan et al., 2016; Wieman,2017).
Multiple sources (Fink, 2013;
Felder & Brent, 2016; Handelsman,Miller, & Pfund, 2007; Jones, Noyd,& Sagendorf, 2015; Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) provide a uniform viewof the general attributes of the coursedesign, or redesign, process. Althoughvarying in advocacy for linear or
relational approaches, these sources
converge on describing course design
as the integration of learning objectives, informational content, instructional strategies, and both formativeand summative assessment of learning. In addition, designing courses
has grown in the last decade to be
an important signature program offaculty-development centers (Beach,

Sorcinelli, Austin, & Rivard, 2016).
Nonetheless, the matter of how STEM
instructors responsible for design anddelivery of courses conceptualize thedesign process remains vague.

Guiding framework
Understanding course design relates
to existing research characterizing
teachers’ definitions of teaching
and curricula and their descriptionsof learning and development as ateacher. Most of this prior workdraws on the phenomenographic
approach, which originated within
higher education research (Tight,
2016). The method has been used todetermine how students and teachers
conceptualize learning and teaching (e.g., Bowden & Green, 2005;
Marton & Säljö, 1976; Trigwell &Prosser, 1999), how faculty conceptualize the meaning of “curriculum”(Fraser & Bosanquet, 2006), andhow faculty view their learning anddevelopment as teachers (Åkerlind,
2007; McKenzie, 2007, Töytäri etal., 2016).
Primarily phenomenographic
studies show consistent variations in
how college teachers describe andconceptualize teaching. These conceptualizations range from teacherfocused strategies with the intentionof transmitting knowledge, throughvariously defined intermediate stages
to learner-focused strategies intended
to foster students’ construction ofVol. 48, No. 4, 201981

R E S E A R C H AND T E A C H I N G

knowledge and conceptual change(e.g., Kember, 1997; Trigwell &Prosser, 1999; Trigwell, Prosser, &Taylor, 1994; Prosser & Trigwell,2006; Samuelowicz & Bain, 2001).
A parallel hierarchical view ofwhat it means to develop as a teacher
is elucidated in the phenomenographic research of Åkerlind (2007)
and McKenzie (2007) in different
studies of Australian university faculty. Faculty members’ views of theirdevelopment span from becoming
more familiar with what to teach (tobe a more comfortable and confident
teacher) to becoming a more effective
facilitator of students’ learning via
research-based practices regarding
student development.
In another qualitative study ofAustralian faculty, Fraser and Bosanquet (2006) found a range inconceptualizations of “curriculum.”
These views ranged from the content
of individual courses or a program ofstudy to a dynamic entity developed
interactively by faculty and students.
Other work points to the interdependence between individuals
and the sociocultural environmentof the institution as key elements offaculty work. Boelryk and Amundsen’s (2016) research documents thesocial influences of faculty members’interactions with peers, students, andinstitutional priorities. Similarly,
when considering how instructors
report what they learn, Töytäri et al.
(2016) found four related categories
of individual learning, collegial learning, team learning, and innovative
partnership learning.
Acknowledging the documentation of multiple conceptualizationsof teaching, curriculum, and professional development in the body ofliterature referenced previously, we
use a phenomenographic, qualitative
framework to investigate higher edu82

Journal of College Science Teaching		

cation instructors’ understandings of
STEM course design. Phenomenography asserts that individuals have different concepts of the world because
any person at any time only partiallyexperiences a phenomenon (Bowden& Walsh, 2000; Marton, 1981, 1986).
Therefore, people discern contrasting
aspects of a concept or a phenomenon
to different degrees, including differences that arise in varying context orat different times. This leads to thefundamental nondualistic ontologicalposition in phenomenography; object (in this case, course design) andsubject (i.e., teacher) are inseparable
because the subject’s experience andunderstanding of the object is a relationship between the two. Therefore,
phenomenography is a second-orderresearch approach because it does
not simply seek to describe thephenomenon but rather the relation
between the phenomenon and how
people experience it from different
perspectives.

PurposeThis study is prompted by the question: What does course design mean
to college science and math teachers? The inquiry contributes to theresearch on teaching that allows in-structors to ground their work within the conceptualizations of otherteachers while informing faculty
developers of effective practices incourse-design programs.

Methods
This research used a qualitative phenomenographic methodology. The
researchers aim to conceptualize theexperiences of a phenomenon—themeaning of mathematics and science
course design to STEM teachers to
describe the participants’ various understandings in a shared, relational,
and categorical manner.
The study utilized semistructured
interviews, each lasting 60–90 minutes, with nine STEM instructors. The
nine participants consisted of tenured
professors, full-time nontenure-track
teaching faculty, and graduate teaching assistants in STEM disciplines.
Although the participants had different levels of teaching experience,
all participants completed a STEM
course redesign professional development program as part of a team andtaught the newly designed course
prior to this study. Because of thesmall sample size, we do not disclose
demographic data of the participants
to preserve anonymity.

TABLE 1
Standard interview questions.
1. What does it mean to design a course?
2. How do you go about designing or redesigning a course? Why do you do it thisway?
3. Have you always done it this way? If not, how and why has your experiencechanged during your career?
4. Tell me about how other people have influenced your conceptualization ofcourse design in a negative, positive, or neutral way.
5. In your experience, what processes enhance or impede the successful design orredesign of a course?

Each interview was a predesigned
protocol of open-ended questions,shown in Table 1, with further probing
by the interviewer to gain a description of course design. The project wasapproved by the institutional review
board at the authors’ university. Theinteractions between the interviewer
and interviewees aided the instructors to create meaning about thephenomenon of course design (Larsson, & Holmström, 2007). Concrete
examples were elicited to understandhow and why courses are designed asthey are.
Using criterion sampling (Lincoln& Guba, 1985), participants wereselected from among members ofa STEM professional-development
program for course redesign at a
research-intensive university. The
professional-development programwas 1 year long and included an
intensive 2.5-day institute followedby monthly meetings and consultations with two faculty developers.
Instructors formed teams of 2‒5
members who redesigned an existing gateway science or mathematics
course or developed a new course
based on literature and best practices
in teaching and learning. Each of fourannual cohorts included three to four
such teams who met together as afaculty learning community. Guided
by the approach of Handelsman et al.
(2007), each team generated active
learning–focused courses based onrevised or new learning objectives andaccompanied by new formative andsummative assessments. Interaction
between teams within each cohort andacross cohorts allowed for peer input
beyond facilitation by the two faculty
developers. The program components
are described further by Smith andStark (2016).
Interviews were conducted by aninvestigator who was not connectedto the professional-development program. Audio recordings of the interviews were transcribed and analyzed
using qualitative methods in line witha phenomenographic approach.
The three-person research teamread the interview transcripts to reveal
categories of description (Bowden &Green, 2005), which were identified
as qualitatively different meanings
or ways of experiencing the phenomenon. The categories emerged
in totality from collective participant
conceptualizations. Therefore, statements by an individual may fall into
various categories, and the categories
describe ways of conceptualizing
course design and not ways of describing the individual participants.
The categories resulted from aniterative analysis process with theresearchers challenging, revising,and aligning the transcribed interview
utterances to the apparent categories(Bowden & Walsh, 2000). The category descriptions were refined into
the outcomes space that represents thecourse-design phenomenon as experienced by the participants (Marton& Booth, 1997). The research teamanalyzed all categories to ensure they
were distinct, logical, and relational,
as is crucial for phenomenographic
analysis (Bowden & Green, 2005).
The primary limitation of thisstudy arises from the relatively small
sample of STEM participants from alarge-enrollment, research-intensive
institution, all of whom participatedin a team-based, faculty-development
program for course redesign. STEM
instructors from other institutions,particularly those with more focusedteaching missions and smaller classsizes, may conceptualize course design differently from the participantsin this study. Likewise, references
to experiences in the STEM course
redesign initiative indicate conceptu-

alizations of what it means to design
a course to include participation infaculty development programs, andlearning from peers within faculty
learning communities, which will not
be true for all STEM instructors. Finally, outcomes may differ for faculty
members outside of the STEM field.

Categories of description
Phenomenographic studies refine
themes that emerge from interviews
into distinct, hierarchically related
categories of description. For thisstudy, five qualitatively distinct notions of course design emerged fromthe interviews (Figure 1). The categories together form an outcomes
space depicting the varying conceptualizations of course design. Furthermore, the categories are hierarchically related and ordered in termsof comprehensiveness and complexity that indicates increasing breadthof awareness of the experienced phenomenon.
Following are the five categories
of description capturing the ranging
ideas of what it means to design acourse. Each category is accompanied
by an archetypal question.
• Category 1. Course design ascontent: “What do I teach?”• Category 2. Course design as
methods: “How do I best teachthis material?”• Category 3. Course design asa reflective practice: “What isworking, what is not working,and how can I make it better?”• Category 4. Course design as
departmental collaboration:“How can we align our teachingacross sections and courses tomake learning experiences betterfor students?”• Category 5. Course design ascollective change: “How canVol. 48, No. 4, 201983

R E S E A R C H AND T E A C H I N G

we enlarge our impact and learn
from one another to continuously
improve teaching and learning inhigher education?”
These categories and their accompanying questions serve as our resultsfrom the study. We will now explore
each category from the utterances inthe transcripts in the following sections.

Category 1: Course design ascontent
Category 1 descriptions illustratecourse design as a process of selecting content. Participants ask themselves, “What do I teach?” This firstcategory describes course design as
an individual action to determine
course content based on topical priorities and/or stated learning outcomesalong with the time allocated toeach topic or outcome (see Table 2).
As one participant put it: “I comeup with my list of topics, [and] then,[determine] what can be accomplished in said time period.”
The course topics might be aperception of what is traditionallyaccepted in the discipline, how thecourse has been previously taught, or
the content featured in a textbook. On
the basis of this topical list, instructors determine the time to spend oneach topic. Student learning outcomes
were included as an essential part ofdesigning the course. Some instructors shifted their focus from topics tooutcomes throughout time (Table 2,quote c).

Category 2: Course design as
methods
Category 2 descriptions illusratecourse design as a process of choosing the best methods for instruction(see Table 3). This category is characterized by the question, “How do I
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Journal of College Science Teaching		

best teach this material?” Instructors
conceptualize course design as an individual action where they determine
the strategies and tools for instruction and assessment. In this category,
instructors think about activities forthe student to accomplish learning
outcomes; for example, “I start tothink what was the best format andactivities that can allow the students
to accomplish those outcomes.”
Participants would question how
to best teach after considering thecourse content or learning outcomes(Table 3, quote a). Some instructors
described incorporating in-class and

FIGURE 1
The outcomes space for instructors’ conceptualization of course
design consists of five categories of description that are hierarchicallyordered in terms of comprehensiveness and complexity that indicatesincreasing breadth of awareness of the experienced phenomenon.
Each category can be associated with a guiding question that
describes course design at that level. Categories 1 through 3 focus on
individual action, with “I” in the guiding questions. Categories 4 and 5
view course design within larger communities, with “we” in the guiding
questions.

TABLE 2
Instructor statements relevant to Category 1: Course design ascontent.
a) “Okay where’s the textbook? How many [chapters] do I have to cover? . . . What’s
the content that they’re supposed to know?”b) “I think about what the end goals are. What are the outcomes that my students
are supposed to take away? And then work backwards from there.”c) “My previous approach started from what I want to teach them. And now I
start with what’s the goal . . . , objectives, and what kind of outcomes I’d like mystudents to have after they complete a course.”out-of-class learning elements (Table
3, quote b).
A variety of teaching methods usedin courses were described. The teachingstrategies and tools discussed during
the interviews by participants included:
preparing lecture videos for online
access, interactive lectures, students

TABLE 3
Instructor statements relevant to Category 2: Course design as
methods.
a) “To design a course is just putting down the information you want to get across. . . and then you think about how are they going to do it, and what are they goingto do?”b) “I think about three spaces in terms of learning. I think about what students
can learn before class time to prepare for the class . . . what students are going to
do in the class, and . . . what students have to do after the class to practice andcement that piece.”c) “. . . because I wanted to interact with the students more. I wanted to do morethan just stand there and lecture . . .”d) “When you first start teaching, you think ‘okay so what did my teachers do?’And so, you’re like ‘okay, so I’m going to model my teacher and so then they [thestudents] will model me’; the cycle of life shall continue. But, then after a while
you realize this is no replacement for them [students] doing it, you know. They
have to do something, not just watch me.”TABLE 4
Instructor statements relevant to Category 3: Course design as
reflective practice.
a) “It’s all about what did I do last year and then just revising to make
improvements.”b) “You either fix the lower hanging fruit or you say, ‘I have to work on the harderones and let the lower hanging ones go because they were tolerable and surethere were some little mistakes but we’ll fix those along the way.’ So every
semester it becomes easier; there’s less to fix, there’s less trial and error. And,
then when you get to the point where you’re pretty happy then you start toreevaluate again.”c) “I’m teaching a class and maybe forty percent of the students get a failing
grade. That can’t all be the students. There’s gotta be something else going on or I
don’t know what is going on.”d) “You get the same student responses: ‘I really studied this’; ‘I really
understood this’; ‘I’ve just got an F on this test.’ So when you get a few of those,
as a teacher you begin to reflect on yourself, you start to think, ‘WOW! What am
I doing wrong?’ [laughing]. ‘Why isn’t this working?’ ‘How come everybody isn’t
getting it?’”e) “When you’ve been tasked to teach a class you think, ‘So when I took that classwhat did it look like?’”working in groups, instructor writing
on a chalkboard or whiteboard, useof audience-response systems, writing to learn, completing homeworkassignments, conducting laboratory
experiments, collecting data, incorporating real-world examples, andformative and summative assessmentthat served as learning opportunities.
No participant specifically referred
to creating lectures as a part of theirdesign. Instead, instructors gravitatedtoward discussion about active learning techniques and how their methods
for engaging learners may change overtime (Table 3, quotes c and d).

Category 3: Course design as areflective practiceCategory 3 descriptions illustratecourse design as a reflective practicethat individuals use to improve theirown course. The category is characterized by asking, “What is working,what is not working, and how can I
make it better?” Course design conceptualized in this category involves
an ongoing process of individual reflection on data, experiences, and/or beliefs that inform adjustments
to both what is taught and how it istaught (see Table 4). A participantsummarized their thinking: “Whathappened here? Why? Then, as a result of that thinking or reflection, I
started to think about how to modify
it.”
In this category, design is viewed as
an iterative process that is informed bydata about student learning (Table 4,quotes a and b). After teaching thecourse, some instructors focused on
reworking the content and pedagogy
rather than creating an entirely new
approach. However, some instructors
felt it necessary to completely discard
what was not working in favor of
new ideas and material to test in theclassroom. Even after developing
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R E S E A R C H AND T E A C H I N G

a track record with a course, some
instructors would continue to collectpertinent data and refine the course
using analyses from their classroomaction research.
Instructors pointed to various
catalysts for their reflection including
viewing students as sources of data
to inform change. Reflection was
triggered by conversations withstudents, patterns in assessment
questions missed by multiple students,
watching students and seeing what
topics cause unproductive struggle,
or reading student ratings (e.g.,
Table 4, quotes c and d). Participantsalso reflected on their past student
experience to inform their course
design decisions (Table 4, quote e).

Category 4: Course design as
departmental collaboration
Category 4 describes course design
as a collaboration to improve sections
and courses within a department. This
category focuses on answering, “Howcan we align our teaching across sections and courses to make learning
experiences better for students?” It
is distinct from the previous categories because the discussion moves
from “I” to “we” (see Table 5). This
conception of course design includes
people within a single department
collaboratively coordinating instruction across course sections or cooperatively integrating courses within
the departmental curriculum. One
participant described the collaboration as such: “So, if you’re teaching‘X’ course and there’s five facultythat are teaching, then the five faculty
should get together and decide what
the outcomes are.”Participants noted that course
design is fueled by the collaborative
energy of engaging with departmentcolleagues. Faculty, graduate students,
and administrators within the depart86

Journal of College Science Teaching		

ment are part of an ecosystem forteaching and learning (Table 5, quotes
a through e). Instructors share resources and insights from their teaching andthe problems they experience. The“collective wisdom” spreads throughthe department among both advanced
and novice instructors and becomespart of what it means to design a course(Table 5, quote c).

Although instructors share resources and knowledge, participants
insisted that no one is compelled toteach in a specific manner, so instructors can retain their autonomy. Rather,
they are provided with the resources
should they choose to use them andencouraged along (Table 5, quote f).
Despite varying degrees of experience,
participants state that they are regarded

TABLE 5
Instructor statements relevant to Category 4: Course design as
departmental collaboration.
a) “The thing that attracted me the most [to redesigning a course] was probably
the willingness of the people involved to do something about it. . . . There’s always
the thought in the back of your head that this is not going to change, I can’t doanything by myself, and you have to get enough people that care about it toactually do something. . . . It’s like there’s a problem that you always know about,and then finally somebody says, we’re going to do something about it and thenyou get excited to be a part of that.”b) “We had weekly meetings amongst all the teachers who were teaching generalchemistry and so that was a place where we would talk about problems we were
having, especially because the year I started teaching there were also a couple ofother (instructors) . . . who were either new to teaching that class or new to using
the active learning techniques that we were using.”c) “I was a part of a cohort of instructors, where we discussed things through and I
was the most junior in that cohort. It was very much a learning experience for me
and in a lot of ways I drew from their collective wisdom that they had worked on.”d) “We meet as a group of instructors to set certain common core questions. So
we don’t always set the same exam, although quite a lot [of instructors] in GenChem II we end up sitting the same exam. But, Gen-Chem I, they tend to be twocamps in terms of somebody likes it really conceptual, somebody couldn’t careabout the conceptual but wants the really hard math problems. But, we can allagree on four or five questions that we think are really important for the students
to know that link to our outcomes.”e) “It’s being part of the team that you trust to not let you go too far off track, but
still gives you the freedom to explore, that is interested in hearing your ideas,
and not just ‘this is what we’re going to do, this is how we’re going to do it, thisis when it’s going to get done.’ I think that the team took my opinions seriously,
which was, very helpful in getting me to actually say something. I felt comfortableapproaching everybody on the team about something that I thought was an
issue, and that was a very important thing for me.”f ) “I told one of the new faculty coming in, I warned him, that we’re doing a lot of
strange things here, and . . . we don’t expect you to do anything this semester. . . .
In the middle of the semester he came back to me and he said, ‘I think I want to
do the small group discussions . . . I really want to give our students a chance totry it out.’ And, I say, ‘okay go for it.’”as valuable members of their department with expertise in areas that canbe added to the shared wisdom of thegroup.

Category 5: Course design ascollective change
Category 5 descriptions portray
course design as a collective change
process across higher education to
improve teaching and learning. The

category is oriented toward answering, “How can we enlarge our impact and learn from one another tocontinuously improve teaching andlearning in higher education?” This
category views course design as anactivity that expands beyond a department to embrace people acrossdisciplines and universities to develop a culture to innovate teaching andlearning (see Table 6). A participant

TABLE 6
Instructor statements relevant to Category 5: Course design ascollective change.
a) “It was a sense of it not just being a community in chemistry, but the entire
campus; and not just between the faculty but also between the students and thefaculty, the students and the students.”b) “I [Mathematics faculty] meet with a couple of Chemistry faculty and weare coming up with a Math 121 section [with] some kind of curriculum that isreally going to help incoming chemistry students. We’ve had so many good
conversations when we all get together, I just learn so much from each other,from sharing.”c) “Connections are so important. I have established great rapport with the library,
and when I told them I wanted to start having my classes come over to the library,
they were champing at the bit.”d) “Because we have such good resources here, we’ve got [student support
service], . . . we’ve got [faculty development center], we’ve got [STEM professional
development program] . . . I can’t do everything myself (laughs) and I would go tothem.”e) “At the end of that semester I found [the faculty development center] and I
went to a designing multiple-choice tests workshop. I realized that there werepeople who actually knew about how people learn, and there are people who
had studied as much as I studied chemistry and the sort of best practices andstructure. So I went to the course-design institute and basically was really inspired
and jumped in and redesigned my course.”f ) “We have the faculty from [a neighbor 2-year institution] teach for us, and thatis for many multipurposes. For example, they can bring our practice back to [theneighbor institution].”g) “There was so much precedence, so many schools, state schools like [anotherinstitution], schools like (an institution), . . . across the board it was very successful,and so we thought we could look at those things, and just model it based on that,and it’s been running. The pass rates have been higher in both classes. “h) “Can I start reading up? Can I start going to conferences where they would
have education venues? Um, what is it that they’re doing? What is it that they’retrying?”explained: “I really think that redesigning needs to be a culture. We
need to work on redesigning towarda change of culture.”
The collective sharing of teaching practices that are supported byadministrators, faculty members, andstudents define a culture of continuous
improvement in teaching and learning
across all of higher education.
Expanding design beyond a department includes communication acrossdisciplines. Instructors consider othercourses that students encounter along
their pursuit of a degree and connect
with faculty from those departments
to share teaching and learning practices (Table 6, quotes a and b).
Participants discussed being part ofan ecosystem of on-campus support
centers. Libraries, tutoring centers,
and faculty-development centers are
local sources for catalyzing and reinforcing a culture for course design thatspreads beyond disciplinary boundaries (Table 6, quotes d and e).
Category 5 also includes reaching
to neighboring institutions and offcampus resources to improve courses.
For example, participants discussed
the advantages of working with counterparts at neighboring institutions.
In this category, instructors look formodels of best practices in teaching
and learning across institutions (Table
6, quotes f and g). Professional development conferences and workshops
along with research literature are seen
as essential diffusion of teaching innovations that inform course design(Table 6, quote h).

The outcome space at a glanceTo summarize, relevant utterancesfrom interviews were grouped andrefined into five distinct interpretations of what it means to design acourse. Each category is a mixtureof responses that were gleaned fromVol. 48, No. 4, 201987

R E S E A R C H AND T E A C H I N G

the interviews and refined by the researchers. Categories 1–3 include
an individual emphasis on choosing
what to teach, how to teach, and what
to change in the course. Categories 4
and 5 include a community approachto designing courses within the department, across disciplines, and beyond one’s own institution. This outcome space illustrates course design
as both an individual and collective
activity of developing a course byconsidering content, pedagogy, reflection, and a sharing of resources
and knowledge.

Integration and significanceThe conceptions of course design
captured in this study point to refining the culture of teaching andlearning as a continuous individual
and social process of improvement,with the latter including processes
within departments, across disciplines, and expanding to other campuses. Designing courses is central
to how instructors view teaching,
their personal development as ateacher, and their perceptions oflearning (Töytäri et al., 2016). How
faculty conceptualize course designis also crucial to facilitating instructional-change processes (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011;
Kezar, Gehrke, & Elrod, 2015) andthus is an important factor for faculty developers to consider.
It is important to note that our
results extend beyond the idea ofindividual instructors developing
courses (Categories 1–3) to a broader
conception of course design that entails collaboration among communities of instructors who work together
to develop courses (Category 4) andto collective efforts across and beyond institutions (Category 5). Thisfinding is consistent with the view ofindividual learning, collegial learn88

Journal of College Science Teaching		

ing, team learning, and innovative
partnership learning among faculty
as discussed by Töytäri et al. (2016).
Elrod and Kezar (2017) similarly
regarded organizational learning
beyond departments as essential forreforming STEM instruction. Therefore, faculty should seek collaborators within and beyond their disciplinary departments when seeking
to design new courses and redesign
existing ones, and STEM department
chairs and faculty developers should
encourage and arrange such networking opportunities.
The strength of this broader concept of course design by the study
participants differs from views ofcollaboration and collectivism as
contrary to the culture of higher
education (MacGillivray, 2017). It
is consistent, however, with Boelryk
and Amundsen’s (2016) conclusionthat social, as well as individual,
factors affect faculty learning aboutteaching. The broader conceptions ofdesign as collaborative and collective
activities also incorporates STEM instructors’ preference for personal evidence rather than empirical evidence(Andrews & Lemons, 2015; Dancy,
Henderson, & Turpen, 2016), giventhat instructors become a part of a
supportive ecosystem where personalconnections are fostered.
Collectively, the aforementioned
body of research, including thisstudy, points to the importance of the
instructor as an individual (Categories
1–3), as the member of a department(Category 4), and as part of a larger
community within and beyond theirown institution (Category 5) as factors
in course design. This result matcheswith the urging by MacGillivray(2017) to catalyze innovation andprogress within disciplines acrossgeographic and cultural boundaries.
Administrators, including deans andchairs, are important players in shaping the institutional culture (Kelly,2014), but ultimately it requires energy from stakeholders at all levels,
including students and instructors(Oliver & Hyun, 2011).
The work of faculty-development
centers to spark and support course
design and redesign should move beyond programming for individual instructors. Those interested in catalyzing change to broaden the conceptionof course design as a collaborative(Category 4) or collective (Category 5)
endeavor should work toward promoting a shared vision (Oliver &Hyun, 2011); nurturing communities
of practice (Anderson & Schönborn,
2008; Stark & Smith, 2016) anddepartmental faculty networks (Andrews, Conaway, Zhao, & Dolan,2016); establishing faculty learning
communities (Cox, 2004); guiding
and participating in action research
projects (Kember & McKay, 1996);
and valuing scholarship of teaching
and learning (Fraser, 2016; Saroyan& Trigwell, 2015).
The current study reveals hierarchical conceptualizations of course
design (Figure 1) that interestingly
parallel the results in previous, also
mostly phenomenographic, studies of
how faculty view teaching (Prosser,
Trigwell, & Taylor, 1994; Trigwell &Prosser, 1999) and their development
as teachers (Åkerlind, 2007; McKenzie, 2007). For example, Åkerlind(2007) found that instructors envision
their development as teachers withina hierarchy from becoming more familiar with what to teach, to becoming
more familiar with how to teach, andto finding out which teaching strategies do and don’t work for both teacher and students. This hierarchy in thedevelopment as a teacher is mirroredin the findings from this study where
instructors perceived course design

as what to teach (Category 1), how
to teach (Category 2), and reflection
on teaching experiences that inform
improvement (Category 3). These
comparable categories for describing different phenomena may reveal
a close relationship between how
faculty perceive their development
as a teacher and how they perceive
course design as a core responsibility. Furthermore, McKenzie (2007)
viewed reflective practice as central
to faculty members developing fromteacher-centered to student-centeredviews of teaching, which matcheswith research results focused on
how faculty define their teachingapproaches (Henderson et al., 2011;
McKenzie, 2007; Trigwell, Martin,
Benjamin, & Prosser, 2000) and is inline with what emerged in our data for
Category 3 (course design as reflective practice). Whereas McKenzie’s(2007) discussion of reflection in
the context of teacher development
focused on the difference between
teachers reflecting on themselves,
their teaching, and students’ reactions
to teaching, within the conceptualization of course design presented here
there is greater faculty reflection on
student learning.
To summarize, the results ofour research provide a model forunderstanding what course designmeans to faculty that can be usedby faculty and faculty developers toplan course-design processes. The
research results share some characteristics with parallel but different
studies about faculty roles in teaching, thus increasing the trustworthiness of the results. Furthermore,
what it means to design a course is aprocess that can be individual or collective, selective or reflective, and a
dynamic factor influencing not only
teaching, but also the learning that
occurs for students. ■Acknowledgments
The authors express appreciation to the
instructors who participated in the study.
This work was supported by Universityof New Mexico STEM Gateway throughthe U.S. Department of Education Title V
Program, P031C110184.

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Gary A. Smith (gsmith@unm.edu) is assistant dean of Faculty Development in
Education at the School of Medicine anda professor in Organization, Information,and Learning Sciences; Audriana Stark
is a doctoral candidate in Organization,
Information, and Learning Sciences; andJulie Sanchez is director of Assessment,
all at the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque.

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