Purpose and Relevance of Coursework

A strong emphasis on the purpose of coursework and its relevance to students’ careers, interests, and lives improves student motivation and engagement. This could include applicable skills they will learn or how the class will help them develop new ways of thinking about problems. This is especially helpful for students taking required courses, such as the GIRs, or other courses outside their major. Students who see their coursework as connected to a larger purpose or as relevant to their lives are more motivated to persist through learning challenges (Yaeger et al., 2014) and feel a greater sense of belonging (Rainey et al., 2018).

Key Features:

  • Clearly stated purpose of learning activities (e.g., in class activities, homework)
  • Clearly stated purpose of the main assessments, linked to learning outcomes  
  • Clearly stated purpose and value of in-class participation, if participation is required or expected
  • Clearly stated relevance of coursework to career and life-oriented contexts

MIT Examples:

Course Description

We are swimming in data — “Big” and small, global and personal. And we are also facing complicated problems like climate change and inequality whose stories can only be told with data. The need for public understanding of data-driven issues is higher than ever before. But raw data doesn’t make a good story… and that’s where you come in.

This class is focused on how to tell stories with data to create social change. We will learn through case studies, examples and hands-on work with tools and technologies. We will introduce basic methods for research, cleaning and analyzing datasets, but the focus is on creative methods and media for data presentation and storytelling. We will consider the emotional, aesthetic and practical effects of different presentation methods as well as how to develop metrics for assessing impact.

R. Bhargava. CMS.631 Data Storytelling Studio: Climate Change. Spring 2017. MIT OCW. CC BY-NC-SA.

Let’s Talk

If you have any questions or want to talk through your syllabus, please contact Teaching + Learning Lab, GradSupport (for graduate courses), or S3 (for undergraduate courses). If you want to go deeper, please visit the TLL’s Syllabus Checklist to Support Student Belonging & Achievement, a comprehensive, evidence-based syllabus checklist which informed this resource.

Principle:

Syllabus Topic:

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