Creating Courses for Adults: Design for Learning

This book offers unique insights into designing courses for adults. If you are responsible for something along these lines (I picked it up because I participate and mentor in a Jobs For Life program for adults) then you will find valuable information here. A great supplement to the teachers guide for your current course, or if you are starting from scratch this is well worth it. Valuable and Recommended.

As a two-year college professor, I've been a fan of Jossey-Bass publications for years. They always put out thoughtful books that contain valuable information, and so I was eager to read this book to see if I could pick up some new ideas. Even though I'll be starting my twenty-second year of teaching this coming fall, I'm always on the lookout for new ideas to incorporate into my classes. I found this new book by Ralf St. Clair (which focuses on teaching both non-credit and credit courses) to be very useful.As St. Clair states at the beginning of the Preface, "The big idea of this book is that education for adults has to be designed. Whether it's a one-hour class on wine tasting or a four-month language course, there are some key decisions that must be made as the course is crafted." To help achieve those goals, St. Clair breaks things into three core factors: matters that affect you as the educator, matters that affect your students, and matters that affect the course content itself. The central focus is on design since St. Clair believes that good course design helps create dynamic, engaged teachers and students.To that end, St. Clair provides a Program Design Chart to help you build your course from the ground up, depending on your aims, methodologies, and values. He asks you to give careful attention to how each of these areas will impact your students.Before purchasing this book, you'll also want to be open to using active learning, collaboration, and principles of student self-responsibility in your classes. I already use these methodologies when I teach, but I just wanted to point this out in case you don't.St. Clair also uses nice analogies throughout the book, as well as good examples from the classroom. The book is also grounded in theory and research.While a bit dry in places, this is overall a helpful book that asks the educator to reflect on her or his core beliefs and how she or he will bring those into each unique course.

This is a good overall resource book for instructors of higher education. The first part of the book focuses on the educators, the learners, and the contexts that drives the design of learning. The second part of the book is a chapter-by-chapter walk through looking at the aims (why are you teaching what you're teaching/objectives), resources (how does the content support the aims), methods, learner input (individual vs group work), demonstrating learning (activities & assessment) and learning transfer (how will the learner use what they learned in the future). As the author goes through each of these sections, he always goes back to the educator, learner, and context lens to gives tips and examples to demonstrate his ideas. Overall, it is well-written and clear, and this book would be a great resource particularly for those that are new to teaching adults and may be of great value to those involved in vocational education. I appreciated that the idea of assessment was woven throughout the book because it is such an important topic in higher education today, but I wish the author had spent a little more time with it and I found his discussion of rubrics much to light to be of value to a novice (in other words, the short explanation and one example isn't quite sufficient and I would have liked to have seen more).

Overall an interesting book with detailed sources backing up its opinion. I found particularly interesting the section on objectives and how they can hamper certain kinds of courses, depending on the desired outcome.Most helpful is the Book in a Box featured in Ch 10 which is a concise tool that I can use long after I've forgotten the minutia of the other chapters.

Professor St. Clair brings across the ideas that education, especially of adults, must be a designed and reflective experience. He emphasizes that superior construction must bear in mind the context of the instructor, the students, content and context. Rather than advocating a prescriptive strictly structured approach to adult education, he puts the perspective teacher into the mode of a "Reflective Practitioner" and by eliciting the questions and dimensions of thought the instructor must incorporate into his course design he enables this self reflective approach. But in eliciting the course design as a conversation between the student, instructor and content he offers primarily a socio-cultural perspective of "Mind in Society", I believe that this ignores some of the input that Cognitive Science could offer in structuring curriculum and assuring mastery of content.

This book covers all the elements needed to create and design learning courses for adults. It is very detailed and academic in its writing style and structure. I would have preferred a more casual writing style. However the content and process is here whether you want to design an e-course, personal interest course, or a work shop. The books shows how to take a student through the complete process of learning a subject from start to finish, I believe this could even be used in colleges and tech schools for course design and implementation. Not an easy read but well worth the effort.

This is a great basics type book for teaching/ creating courses for adults. The author includes several good tips and practical examples along the way. If you've taught adult courses for a while then there isn't much new here but it may serve as a good refresher. If you are new to the field than I think this book will be a helpful start in your core planning.