Designing a syllabus focusing on the hands on component

Before getting into this topic, here's a brief background: syllabus is not popular in Chinese universities. The course instructor usually tells the students how the grade will be given between quizzes, midterms and finals, and that was as close as students can get to a syllabus. Course projects are fairly rare in the course design procedure, and therefore not considered a part of performance evaluation. College education in China is very different, but the one aspect that stood out was the lack of autonomy on the students' part.

I experienced a little bit of a cultural shock when I walked into the classroom for the first class I took at Penn State. The teaching assistant handed the students a syllabus, detailing the course schedule, course objective, evaluation standards, contact information of the instructor, and resources students may find useful.

It never crossed my mind that a syllabus would be so helpful in the learning experience of students. When the opportunity of designing a syllabus came up during AEE530, I was very excited, as I could finally put down what would be an ideal syllabus in my opinion.

I chose to create a syllabus for a class I took two years ago (Plant Ecology, HORT450). The class was no longer offered since Dr. David Mortensen retired. But the idea of combining lectures, experiments, field trips, and most importantly, a student-chosen final project has become an ideal system to design a class that inherently involves a lot of hands-on practice.

Keeping the idea of maximizing students' experience as much as possible, I put down the course objective, resources, and evaluations plans emphasizing that students can choose their own final project ideas. Speaking from my own experience, being able to know in advance the topic/activities of a certain lecture is very helpful for me to prepare my study. I incorporated that into a weekly schedule of what the lectures or field trips will be about.

The peer review response I received was mostly positive, with comments like "this is a class I'll be interested in taking, if I have background in plant science". During the deep dive process, Jesse also gave me a similar remark. I was glad to say that I feel like this would be a helpful and tangible class for the students to take.