I’m reading a book about pedagogy in higher education, and I’m presently trying to go through a chapter on course planning. It’s important and should be interesting, but I’m annoyed with having to handle sentences like this:
bq. Identify the links between objectives/outcomes, student characteristics, course/module content, teaching and learning strategies, course/module assessment methods.
Aaagh! Why include all those slashes ? Why not simply state “course = course / module” early on, and not break up the text like that? These are two
“Objectives/outcomes” and “course/module” occur throughout the chapter, so the brain is continually having to make sense of the text – either reading the ugly phraseology or continually having to make a substitution like this73: s/bjectives\/module/bjectives/.
Objectives/outcomes is the worse: not only is it ugly, but it’s not even clear why we need both. Apparently they are slightly different things, but the author doesn’t bother to tell use what the difference it. Come to that, the author doesn’t bother to tell use what either one is. The book’s glossary admits that the definition of objectives has wandered a bit, and gives a rough definition, but doesn’t have an entry for outcomes.
Just to demonstrate the effect of all those slashes – how many of you spotted the grammatical error in the quote?
73 Someone can correct it if they wish.
Duly excused.
I just got back from out of town, so may have to wait a full week before commenting back on your comment last Wednesday.
Whoever wrote that sentence (that fragment) was just lazy. You were not supposed to actually try to derive any information from it. It sounds rather like the rest of the book is the same. Why are you reading it? Nothing beats trial and error (but pity the grad students), or learning by example (go sit in the back of some popular professors’ courses).
The book is multi-author, most of the chapters are better and it does introduce some useful ideas. The fragment is bullet-pointed, which changes the style a bit, and this is one of the things the reader is expected to be able to do. It’s either an objective or an outcome. Either way, I think I’d fail.
This is all for a course I’m taking on university pedagogy. On the whole it’s been very useful and worth taking, but it has reinforced some of the clichés about the social sciences.