Being on the quarter system requires deliberate choices about scoping the curriculum. Each textbook created for this project will have about 8 chapters of 7,500 to 10,000 words each. This meets one of the Accessibility criteria for success: Total chapter engagement is scoped to 10,000 words, or no more than 90 minutes of total engagement (approximately 72 minutes of reading time + 18 minutes of required multimedia).

Authors curate and shape the content to pull forward what’s most important for students to consider. Student feedback from past projects reveals that students will not do more than two hours of reading per week. Right-sized books are also more likely to be adopted by other instructors, who can understand how the book will fit into their curriculum and supplement with materials that reflect their teaching practice.

Keep in mind that chapters are not just text. Based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning, chapters will incorporate visual media like images and videos, as well as recurring features like spotlights, discussion questions, and H5P interactives that support multiple means of engagement. These elements also add to the ask for your students’ time and attention. Right-sizing the textbook and chapter length, as well as planning the use of media and recurring chapter elements, are all ways to design your project with equity in mind.

In short: ruthlessly right-sizing your textbook is critical to centering the student learning experience.

Draft a Book Description

During this unit, your author team is going to draft your book description. Think of this as a vision for what the blurb on the back of the book will eventually say. Define what success looks like in 100 words or fewer. What does this textbook do that others do not?

To begin your book description, take a moment to think about what you want your textbook to accomplish. How does it add to the conversation in your discipline? How does it satisfy statewide learning outcomes while adding a fresh perspective and centering equity, diversity, and inclusion? Note the use of the present tense here – your goal is to describe the book as though it already exists.

The project description serves multiple purposes:

• Communicates the content and approach of your textbook to external reviewers.
• Identifies how your textbook differs from other textbooks and offers students a unique perspective.
• Orients Pilot Instructors to the overarching goals of the textbook so they can decide whether to adopt it.

You can find a template for your book description in your {Course #} About This Book document. Use your weekly team meeting time to bring together ideas that team members have generated on their own. At our next project meeting, we’ll workshop drafts with help from our Instructional Designer.

Draft Chapter Topics

Use your Parking Lot document to make a high-level list of topics that will become the 8 chapters in your book. All authors can contribute to this list of topics. Use team meeting time to start thinking about which author will write which chapter (you will finalize this decision in the next unit).

Here’s what to aim for with your list of chapters topics:

• Align with your course level outcomes: topics cover what students need to know in order to meet your course outcomes.
• Align with your curriculum’s equity statement: topics advance the goals expressed in the draft you wrote in Unit 2.
• Differentiate your curriculum from existing sources in your background scan.

If you’re excited about adding subtopics to your high-level outline, go ahead and add them so that you don’t lose your ideas. In Unit 4, we’ll cover chapter structure in depth.

Staying aligned with our project’s equity statement brings complexity and nuance into the curriculum we are working on. Here are three examples of what this can look like:

• Representation of intersectional identities such as race/ethnicity, gender/gender expression, sexuality, religion, ability, and socioeconomic background.
• Acknowledgment that social inequalities and power dynamics have led to historically exclusive practices and structural inequities within higher education.
• Introspective analysis of a discipline’s complicity in/perpetuation of social disparities and reframing teaching materials to address harms.

Cognitive Load

Right-sizing the curriculum also means right-sizing the cognitive load for students. Extraneous cognitive load refers to the unnecessary mental effort required to access content. When faced with extraneous cognitive load, users must work harder simply to obtain information, let alone process, apply, or synthesize it.

Some examples of extraneous cognitive load include putting too much content into one chapter or linking to lots of videos that don’t directly relate to a chapter’s learning objectives. These design choices can distract students from learning. In fact, they can subtract from it. Too much student effort goes into accessing all the information rather than understanding or applying what is most important. Extraneous cognitive load often happens when educators are rushed or can’t review their textbook or course design with others. Without time for review, it can be difficult to scope content according to estimated hours of course work per credit.

As user experience specialist Maddie Brown argues in the video below (figure Y1 3.3), “We have a finite amount of mental resources or bandwidth to devote to any given task, and once that amount is met or exceeded, we tend to get overwhelmed or give up.” It’s key to remember that cognitive overload disproportionately harms students with disabilities. Students with different processing speeds and modes of attention must exert more mental effort than their peers in order to access the learning experience (Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force, 2021). Scoping textbook content to fit the required hours of coursework is an important way to design for equity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgwlV-vQNYk

Licenses and Attributions for Scope in Curriculum Design

Open content, original

“Scope in Curriculum Design” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Draft a Book Description” is adapted from Project Description: Tips and a Template by Stephanie Lenox for Chemeketa Press, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

References