Academic Technology NEXUS
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Dear Instructional Designer,
I am an Adjunct Professor who has been at ACC for 20 years. I have always taught a 16-week course but I was just assigned a 12-week session for the first time. I am unsure how to best approach and manage this new session given the difference in length and would appreciate any guidance you can provide.
– Course Compressor
Dear Course Compressor,
I can certainly understand how this shift in course length presents a new challenge. Not to worry – here are some tips and resources to help you make this adjustment a smooth one for both you and your students.
Backward Design is how we usually look at course structure. We start with the learning outcomes, what we want the students to be able to demonstrate, and then figure out the materials, activities, and assessments that go with each objective. You can access an example ACC course map here, which I encourage you to fill out. You want to look at your 16 week course objectives and figure out what is absolutely required, what is important, and what is just “nice to know” and cut out some of those. Trying to fully condense a 16 week into 12 without cutting anything isn’t generally recommended because of cognitive load theory and the spacing effect.
Rethink if you want to move from weekly modules to “unit” modules. A typical pattern is to fold Weeks 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, etc., into combined modules with clearer themes.
Be clear to the students about what is going on. Explain that they are in an accelerated course so things are going to move faster than they may be used to. Remind the students that it will be imperative to stay on top of their work and outline in every module what they need to Read or Watch, what they need to Do, and what the Assessment will be. Connect the learning outcomes to those activities to help them understand why they are doing what they are doing. And give them a ballpark figure of how much time you are expecting each chunk to take. I like to create a PDF course schedule with the dates of the term and all the due dates so that they can print it or save it and cross things off.
You also want to use frequent, smaller check‑ins (quick quizzes, minute papers, short reflections) to monitor learning and catch problems early when things move faster. This is especially important because students in shortened terms can experience more stress and less recovery time between tasks.
It’s a lot to generate so I recommend leaning on Google Gemini for help. It’s in your Google Workspace Tools. Make sure you use your ACC linked account so that all of your course materials will stay secure and make sure to double check every single thing it generates for students because there can always be hallucinations and errors with generative AI.
I hope this helps you! Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any further questions or to set up a 1:1 meeting.
Backwards by design,
Your Instructional Designer
Additional Resources:
Achieving the Dream Preparing Shortened Academic Terms (page 20-22)
Dear Instructional Designer,
My students are working on Economic Research Projects. When they use the free Chat GPT, it is not enough, so they sometimes get kicked out before accomplishing their task. I want to avoid equity issues for the student who doesn’t own a subscription to OpenAI. So am looking for a free alternative to put all students on equal footing. Do ACC students have free access to Perplexity or another AI that is suitable for economic research?
-AI Instructor
Dear AI Instructor,
I got your request and I have some answers for you but the bigger answer is there is an GAI Strategic Planning Committee that is working on guidelines and investigating potential tools for ACC. As it is right now, ACC does not offer students any specific AI tools. However, there are quite a few free models that we have access to and combining them can get you pretty far.
First, you mentioned Perplexity and I have the free version of this tool. I use it extensively to find research materials and I haven’t hit the paywall yet. I would recommend to your students to use the Spaces feature to collect their research. Depending on what you are researching, users can also change the focus of the research to rely on academic sources, or social media sources, or the internet at large. These different focus areas change the results dramatically and can be very interesting.
Another tool that I recommend is Consensus which is an AI tool designed to search only academic papers. Like Perplexity, it footnotes every source it mentions with a link to the actual paper and it also creates academic citations.
Scispace has unlimited usage at the Basic level but it doesn’t do as thorough a job as the paid account. It’s similar to Consensus and only uses academic papers. The cool thing about this tool from a teaching POV is that it asks some clarifying questions to make sure it understands exactly what the user is looking for. It will then do a search and order its finding by relevance. Each paper will have an “Insights” column automatically added so I can see if the paper is applicable. I can make columns to quickly compare conclusions or methods of different papers to find exactly what I’m interested in.
You are definitely not alone in your concerns about student equity. I think these tools will all come at a price in the future and it could cause lots of harm to our students at that point. But right now, since all the tools are competing with each other and experimental, the free versions are really helpful and always provide more information than I can handle!
I hope this information addresses your question. If you need any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
Yours in AI and insight,
Stephanie Bogdanich, Instructional Designer
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