next »

[southerntransplant]

Last semester I taught an undergraduate senior-level course in STEM. We're kind of a specialized program inside a larger department, and while it's not a course that often gets taught at the same department at other universities (except as a technical elective), it is a typical senior level course at other institutions which have the same program we do (and there aren't many of those). The upshot of this is that we often have graduate students who come in from the same department at other institutions who have not had this course in their backgrounds, and are now required to take it as part of their graduate education.

This is the first time I've ever taught two courses which are topically the same but which are part of both the graduate and undergraduate curriculum. The bottom line is that now I have to "graduate-ize" this course, and I'm a bit stuck for ideas on how to do this. (Different faculty have taught the grad and undergrad versions in the past, but due to faculty exodus and the apparent deletion of tenure lines at the moment, I am teaching both).

The undergraduate version is devoid of a lot of the math and focused more on applications, and I can add the math back into the grad version (which I generally love to do anyway). I can also add some more detailed investigations into certain topic areas, and other more "in-depth" stuff which makes the course less of the "overview" course it is at the undergraduate level, but I would be interested to see if other forumites have run into this particular situation and what they might have done about it.

[obprof]

I've been in the same boat.

For my graduate version, students read chapters from an edited volume as well as journal articles (about 6-8 / class). In the other version, students read a textbook and one journal article at a time.

In the graduate version, I don't lecture. The students are responsible for leading the discussion. In the other version, I lecture and then divide the class up into smaller groups for exercises and discussions.

Part of the differences are due to the class sizes (grad class usually has less than ten students, the other is five or six times that), but most of it comes down to how much hand-holding I'm willing to do.