What should I be teaching in my C-I Course?

As you think about the everyday elements of delivering your course and creating learning opportunities, it can help to break out your own communication into two broad categories: 

1. Communication approaches that help students learn the course knowledge. These are communication activities that are help students to engage with the material. Common examples include class discussion, informal essays, note-taking, etc. These are examples of communication activities in which the goal is to increase the learning of the course content, and the skills related to communication are not a focus of assessment or related to the course learning outcomes.

2. Communication approaches you need to explicitly teach or model effectively because they are related to your identified learning outcomes. Communication approaches that are a key part of the identified learning outcomes must be taught. For example, a learning outcome might include knowledge and use of a discipline writing style guide or skill in presenting a business plan. These activities are often a part of the assessment

Something to keep in mind as you prepare for your C-I course is the global and local concerns as they relate to your course materials. Both global and local concerns are important, and depending on your field and what you are asking of the student, the global and the local may blend with what you teach them, inform your assignment criteria, and the focus of your feedback to students. 

• Global concerns are features of communication such as purpose, audience, conventions of the discipline and genre, content, and organization. 

• Local concerns such as style, sentence structure, word choice, gestures in speech, punctuation, justification, font, color, graphical effects or flourishes, etc. 

Here are a few examples of what other faculty teach in C-I courses:

• The structural components of a piece of writing (ex: lab report, scope statement, creative brief) and why they are structured that way

• How paralanguage and non-verbals can be interpreted between two different cultures 

• The why and how of a process students will be asked to follow

• How to condense information and translate it from a 12-page paper into an 8-minute oral presentation without “just reading it really fast”

• The relationship between a 2D and 3D rendering

• Components of hierarchy, color, and cognitive mapping

• The difference between editorializing language and building an argument in academic research

• How to build a slide deck that works in tandem with the presenter rather than distracting from the point

• What is the audience-appropriate professional dress of a presentation

• The layout and common outline of a poster in your discipline and why it is important

• How to write a thesis statement

• Why a certain software is a common tool in your field and the most important tips for effectively using it to convey information

• How to successfully field a Q&A during a presentation

• How to craft and ask an effective interview question