Rigor in Unity DE Graduate Courses
Definitions and understandings of academic rigor vary widely from one discipline and one scholar to the next. For the purposes of this brief overview, academic rigor for Unity DE graduate programs may be understood as a commitment to empowering students to develop disciplinary expertise through scholarship, collaboration, and applied learning.
The goal of undergraduate education is to empower students to think in a given discipline – they are introduced to the language, theories, and methods of research that define a discipline.
In a graduate program, students are empowered to work and converse in the language of a discipline. Through their coursework, graduate students engage with the key theories, debates, and questions that occupy scholars in their discipline. And they solve problems through collaboration and conversation with their instructors as well as their peers. Graduate courses at Unity DE should be focused on developing students’ complex reasoning and research skills. Graduate courses should also incorporate the various professional and academic literacies that are necessary to thrive in a knowledge-based economy. As such, learning outcomes (course and weekly) should be higher level competencies in Bloom’s Taxonomy, which reflect more sophisticated skills and tasks. Most importantly, graduate courses at Unity DE provide students with an opportunity to construct knowledge and solve problems in ways that are commensurate with the real-life practices of professionals within their field of study.
DE G Rigor Quick View
Course Aspects | Graduate Courses |
|---|---|
Activities and Tasks | Self-directed Research with contextually relevant guidance on respected sources in that field, and optional instructions on how to navigate them. Course Projects tend to be modeled on authentic tasks performed by professionals in the field of study. |
Learning Materials | Peer reviewed resources required. Textbook may be appropriate for some content areas, and should still be supported by peer reviewed literature. Specificity of courses may mean that there are no suitable textbooks. |
DE G Rigor Guiding Questions
The following questions are useful for interrogating the appropriateness of certain design choices when building a G course.
Learning Materials
The suitability and relevance of a textbook, article, or any other form of media is largely dependent upon its context within a learning activity and its relationship to the course outcomes. There is no strict criteria for determining the appropriate ratio of peer-reviewed scholarship to gray literature, journalistic media, or other content available on the open web. Similarly, there is no single standard for how many pages per week a graduate student should be expected to read. Students should be directed to the library, when possible, to locate the weekly learning materials via citations and searching the databases, as opposed to linking or attaching the materials. This process builds students’ research skills and gets them comfortable searching the databases. Course citation format should be explicitly stated in the course, but it does not have to be APA as different disciplines may use different citation styles.
The following guiding questions, which reflect the goals stated above, might provide a framework for making decisions about how to promote academic rigor through the selection of learning materials:
Do the learning materials introduce students to the key theories, debates, and questions that occupy scholars in their discipline?
Do the learning materials emphasize relevant and timely peer-reviewed research from reputable journals?
Do the learning materials provide students with an understanding of the key sources of information (publications, academic associations, professional organizations etc.) used by scholars and professionals in their field?
Do the learning materials reveal to students the relationship between scholarship and its application to the sort of problems that they will encounter as professionals in their field?
Do the learning materials and the authors associated with them introduce students to the demographic, ideological, and methodological diversity of the discipline?
Learning Activities and Assessments
From a learning experience design perspective, learning activities in Unity DE’s graduate programs include the general types of activities also employed at the undergraduate level (i.e. Course Project, Discussions, and Assignments). The distinction between undergraduate and graduate courses may be understood in terms of the degree to which students are expected to engage, understand, and apply theoretical insights in their discipline.
At the graduate level, a foundational knowledge of how to think in a discipline is taken as the point of departure for learning how to work and converse in a discipline. Graduate courses should empower students to question, critique, theorize, and apply the knowledge of a discipline at an advanced level. This advanced level is marked by a mastery knowledge of relevant scholarship, professional practices, and critical debates within their discipline.
Graduate courses typically include one assignment and discussion per week. Graduate discussions may require two or three response posts. Graduate students are forming a professional learning community where their peer interactions can be as important and educational as instructor interactions. We also encourage multi-level response interactions so that discussions build upon each other. Graduate assignments often require self-directed research and more sophisticated writing. As mentioned above, course citation format should be explicitly stated in the course and most assignments and discussions should involve citation so that students are modeling academic conventions and scholarly best practices.