Finalizing the Course Syllabus: The Peer Review Process

As a student in AEE 530, my task was to design/create a syllabus or a learning contract for a course or non-formal/informal learning experience. The process was very simple to follow consisting 3 stages the snapshot, the deep dive, and the evidence. The first good thing about the whole process was “Autonomy” which means as a student, I can choose the course contents of my choice. The autonomy in the process was kind of motivating factor for me, because one could write and communicate well about things of interest. I decided to design a course syllabus for “Mechatronic Systems Agriculture” because I am working on similar stuff in PhD

The writing of initial draft was very exciting. While writing the initial draft, I have to think from the prospective of an instructor as well as a student who could be interested in this course. I spend much time in organizing the contents, making the course overview sound and clear, stating the objectives clearly and providing the reading/text recommendations. I included things like course grading scale and policies, attendance policy, assignment and course schedule, and other institutional and academic policies.

The peer review process was very helpful in improving my final version of syllabus. The first peer review stage was “The snapshot” and for that I have to exchange my syllabus with 5 students in the class and get their feedback about style, clarity and tone of the syllabus. I got the chance to look into different style syllabus what my peers have created/designed and at the same time I got feedback from my peers about the syllabus I designed. For me, it was the best part of the whole process because during that quick process I met different audience who are from different field and they may look or perceive the things differently. Every peer I exchanged my syllabus with gave me a valuable opinion about the content and style I used in the syllabus so that gave me a chance to improve my major shortcomings that are evident even in a quick snapshot like deleting some text as the document looks too wordy, breakdown for project/lab grade, formatting, and consistency in wording.

The next stage of the peer review was “The deep dive” where one peer who should not be from the 5 peers during snapshot stage will spend some time in assessing the document I designed. I really appreciate my peer review deep dive partner “Alejandro” who did some excellent review that helped me to improve the clarity, organization, grade breakdown and set a tone that motivate students why they should enrol this course. The deep dive review process highlighted some important things that were overlooked at the initial draft and snapshot phase. Overall, the peer review process was very exciting and it helped me to improve the final version of my document.