In many programs, there will be 40+ courses that must be designed. In the ideal situation, courses are not designed until the program is designed and courses will be reviewed and adjusted after any program adjustment.
A course design should be based on outcomes derived from the program design. The design should consider the prior courses it is built upon (when it was taught, what was emphasized, what was assessed), other courses delivered to the same cohort in the same term (what can be leveraged, reinforced), and where the course’s outcomes will be used in the future and what those other courses rely upon.
There also must be feedback and possible program design adjustments. The program design or revision might have unrealistic expectations or create situations that need to be phased in. The program design cannot be a concrete, inflexible structure and must recognize the infeasible and impractical. You might not have much say in these matters, but you can always innocently raise questions in a subtle way; to see if you can place the crumbs for others to find.
If a course is primarily knowledge based with assessments based on doing the typical problems in a textbook, the course might take a week or two to design. It is possible to design a course in several minutes or hours as well, but there is a difference between a good design and any old design. A bad design is still a design. Just like everyone plans and everyone solves problems daily, there are good plans, good planners, good problem-solvers... and then there are the rest. It is also likely that a good course design will involve multiple individuals.
If the course attempts to develop intellectual abilities and associated skills, the course design can take many months and many meetings. To introduce ANY cognitive skill (beyond simple comprehension and memorization) will take a dramatically different type of course than most courses. You cannot ‘teach’ someone a skill per se, you have to be more of a coach and think like a coach. You will have to reduce the knowledge, memorization and “fact aspect” of the course and expand the experiential components; allowing for constructive failure, feedback, reflection, and deliberate practice. These aspects will take time to design and incorporate, especially if the instructor does not have any formal training in learning and cognitive skill acquisition (by formal training, we mean actual academic studies and not a short workshop here or there). The instructor might have to be assisted by suitably trained resources.
We suggest that courses be seriously re-evaluated every 2-3 years with respect to the learning outcomes and how well things have been going. This might require an occasional service or course load reduction depending on what is involved and what is found. Ok, we realize that this might be hard to do in many departments, so this might be a very rhetorical observation. Nevertheless, it is what should be done in our opinion.
We also suggest that each course have ‘necessary’ aspects identified as part of the program review. Certain aspects of a course should be within the instructor’s scope, but the course is not the instructor’s, it is the institution’s and if there are certain requirements to satisfy institutional outcomes and requirements, the instructor should be obligated to conform. The instructor is being paid to deliver the outcomes. If the instructor wants to deviate and introduce a change to a core concept or method, there should be effective processes for this to be considered and if appropriate, pilots or experiments conducted. An instructor should not have 100% control over a course with everything being within the realm of academic freedom.