The Hub encourages students to explore a range of disciplines and learn skills they can build on in their personal, professional, and civic lives. Your course plays an important role in this exploration and preparation.
All courses that carry Hub areas must list in their syllabi the areas and the learning outcomes for each area. Beyond this policy requirement, faculty can view this resource—which includes two key teaching strategies and a syllabus checklist—as a set of suggestions, not as a prescriptive manual or rulebook.
For an overview of the Hub and important information about teaching Hub summer courses, please see this handout from the BU Hub office and CTL’s Hub Area Guides (for OSC, WIN, IIC, CR, RIL, TWX, and CRI).
Summer’s compressed timeframe means that students learn a semester’s worth of material over the course of six weeks. To work successfully within this timeframe, students should be clear about a course’s learning goals: what they are, when students will focus on them, and how students will demonstrate their comprehension of them or engagement with them. The following strategies can help support student success.
Strategy 1
Link Hub Areas to Assignments
Not every major assignment must connect to a Hub area. A course has its own set of learning goals that may or may not overlap with its Hub areas. Nevertheless, many of a course’s major assignments should relate to the Hub. It should be clear to students when they are engaging a Hub area and how they are being assessed on it.
A useful step is to articulate how the course’s major assignments are connected to specific Hub area learning outcomes.
This mapping allows instructors to see how and when students can demonstrate what they have learned around a Hub area. Linking assignments to Hub areas can also let instructors ensure they are making time for instruction and activities connected to Hub areas.
Tool for Strategy 1
Use the mapping template below (access a drive doc version of this table; copy and paste make your own) to articulate the connections between major assignments and Hub area learning outcomes. Fill in major assignments that connect to Hub areas; for each assignment, describe the Hub areas it connects to and how students will demonstrate their grasp of specific learning outcomes.
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Mapping Template
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| Major assignment |
Connection to Hub learning outcomes |
| [fill in title, description, purpose] |
To which Hub areas does the assignment connect? (There can be more than one!) |
| How does the assignment help students demonstrate their learning around the outcome(s)? Which learning outcomes? |
Strategy 2
Consider Transparent Design for Hub Assignments
Transparent design allows students to understand (1) the purpose of the work, (2) the tasks and steps required, and (3) the criteria that will be used to give a grade or give feedback (Winklemas, TILT). If an assignment engages a Hub learning outcome, it should be clear to students not only that they are working that on a Hub area, but also why they are.
Examples and Templates: The Transparency in Learning and Teaching Project (TILT Higher Ed) provides research and teaching tools, including Example Assignments (more and less transparent) and Tools for Revising/Creating Your Own Transparent Assignments.
Tool for Strategy 2
Use the model purpose statement below to construct a transparent purpose section for a Hub assignment. Language from the model below is bolded to show explicitly how the Hub area learning outcomes are realized in the knowledge and skills students will gain from the assignment. For more strategies, see the TILT resources.
Purpose
One purpose of this assignment is to engage the learning outcomes (below) from the Hub area The Individual in Community, which will help you navigate multiple communities defined by, among other things, race, class, ethnicity, nationality, gender, personal relationships, location, interests, and beliefs. The ability to work as engaged members of diverse communities is essential to many aspects of life in the 21st century.
- Students will reflect critically on their engagement and relations with different communities—campuswide, citywide, national and/or international—and will recognize and analyze the issues relevant to those communities (or to different individuals in those communities).
- Students will consider at least one of the dimensions of experience that inform their own worldviews and beliefs as well as those of other individuals and societies. Such considerations may include (but are not limited to) race, class, gender expression, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity, age, language, religion, politics, or cultural history.
This assignment will help you address these learning outcomes by facilitating the following knowledge and skills.
Knowledge:
- Using class readings, you will learn about the ways in which language marks belonging in a community and is related to worldview.
- You will be able to give an overview of how spoken and written genres carry meaning in a community.
- You will be able to define project-based learning and reflect on how you and your peers can develop or enhance relationships with off-campus communities.
Skills:
- You will learn to use theory to reflect on your own experience with spoken and written language.
- You will develop your capacity for empathy by learning to draft ethnographic interview questions that attempt to understand how communities view issues around language and communication.
Summer Hub Teaching Syllabus Checklist
The list below is designed to help instructors check their syllabi in the weeks or days leading up to teaching a Hub summer course.
- Early in the course, the syllabus and/or the instructor explains to students how the course, overall, will address the learning outcomes of its Hub areas, in addition to or alongside the other learning goals of the course.
- Students should understand how the disciplinary or skill-based content of the course is situated in relation to the Hub learning outcomes of the course. Listing all the learning goals of the course, marking which are Hub learning outcomes, and then noting any connections between the various learning goals and Hub areas, can be a helpful way to create coherence and transparency in your course.
- It is clear how specific assignments are connected to Hub area learning outcomes. While not every assignment needs to be connected to a Hub area, students should understand how they will demonstrate their capacity with Hub learning outcomes.
- The syllabus lists learning outcomes for each Hub area carried by the course. Instructors can reproduce the actual learning outcomes for a Hub area and then help students understand how the course will address those learning outcomes.