I spent the better part of this week updating and revising the syllabus for an undergraduate Strategic Marketing Communications course I'll be teaching in January.
There wasn't anything wrong with the syllabus that was given to me; I could have simply changed the dates and submitted that version to the administration for publication.
It would have been easy... in the short-term.
But investing time to think about things up-front usually makes things easier in the long run.
The existing syllabus had an exam. When classes are being taught in-person, exams are fairly straightforward to arrange. But classes these days are being taught online, and online exams are causing a lot of instructors a lot of headaches. Substituting an end-of-term exam with a series of weekly, online open-book quizzes achieves the same learning objective... but with a lot fewer complications.
Planning isn't the opposite of "action".
Time spent thinking about the work that needs to be done -- and the best way to do it, and the work you shouldn't spend any time doing -- makes things easy in the long run.
And easy in the long-run usually has a bigger impact.
- dp
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