The proposed project is a new course development that is part of the curriculum redesign of the MS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology (1/0) program. As part of the curriculum redesign, a new course titled Organizational Development (OD) will become a required course for MS students. The MS program has a rigorous structure that will require all students to take the OD course in the summer between their first and second years in the program. Notably, the course number (PSYCH 5602) was being used in the former MS program and will be the course number for the new course. However, the content and material covered in the former PSYCH 5602 is distinguishably different from the content that will be covered in the new PSYCH 5602 (OD). Thus, this project is considered a new course development rather than a course redesign.
Because many college students have an overly simplistic understanding of grammar, based on facile “rules” they learned from teachers during their K–12 education or English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction, students often need a considerable amount of direct instruction to develop the terminology and modes of analysis that lead to a sophisticated, linguistically sound understanding of the structure of English. As such, the current structure of the course is based primarily on direct instruction, in the form of lectures and guided practice, accompanied by students’ completion of homework assignments, short reflection papers, and four exams. This current structure could be effectively adapted to an online setting by recording course content as online lectures with both audio and visual components. Furthermore, because the content of the course is illustrated through the production of visual form-function tree diagrams of English sentences, the material is both verbally and visually engaging, perhaps more so than content that relies only on spoken/written material; thus, the content for a fully online linguistics-based grammar course has the potential to engage students on multiple levels, despite the lack of face-to-face meetings.
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