How Penn faculty are innovating their assignments

Some assignment formats are staples: The Blue Book exam, Canvas discussion posts, the term paper. And they’re staples for good reason: They inspire critical thinking, demand synthesis of ideas, and put students in dialogue with others.

But increasingly, instructors are finding new—or sometimes old but sidelined—ways to engage students’ learning processes. Enter, project-based assignments, oral exams, podcasts, and other assignment types that encourage use of tools, collaboration, and experimentation.

“Oftentimes we think about going through flashcards and feeling very overwhelmed by all the knowledge we have to get, but it’s also worth knowing you learn a lot when you’re creating something, working with other people, being playful,” says Cathy Turner, director of faculty programming and pedagogy at the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation. “That’s a form of learning that’s really valuable."

Janine Remillard is a professor and chair of the Learning, Teaching, and Literacies Division in Penn’s Graduate School of Education, who has taught courses and workshops on curriculum design. The aim for any instructor developing assignments in a curriculum, Remillard says, is to first look at—and prioritize—the course’s learning objectives.

“When you design curriculum, you have to start with what you want learners to understand and be able to do, and then you have to think about what kind of evidence they might produce to help you assess progress toward those aims—and then design the activities that move in that direction,” says Remillard. “I think there are lots of reasons people are trying to introduce creative assignments, and one reason is to make it more engaging or interesting, but another is to value different forms of production and evidence and to back away from this more traditional Western writing.”

An assignment should function as a process and not an end product, she explains. A few ideas to keep in mind when developing assignments or activities, she offers: Ask students to make connections between their experience and theory; to apply course concepts or ways of thinking somewhere else; help them develop agency over their own knowledge; and provide opportunities for students to make sense of the process, putting knowledge into practice. 

And: “These things aren’t necessarily separable,” she adds. “They’re interwoven.”

Oral exams

While oral exams are thought of as ancient or Medieval university practice, their usefulness remains constant even in a changing world.

Robin Pemantle, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Endowed Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences (SAS), has taught math for a variety of audiences: K-12 students, undergraduates, and graduate students. And while most of the skills he assesses can be evaluated through written tests, oral exams, he says, gives his students “more than computational skills” and allows him to understand how a student thinks through complex problems. The benefit, he says, is that students can showcase what they really know and avoid being tripped up by small mistakes. Some students, he adds, simply get less flummoxed in an oral exam than sitting down for a timed written one.

Or, conversely, a student might not perform well but it gives Pemantle a window to see what needs to be corrected.

“Sometimes it shows they don’t know as much as they thought, and I can help them with why they don’t and see what they would need to do to get better,” Pemantle explains. “Sometimes they’ve had years of superficial understanding, but they’re good at the superficial level, so they have a hard time seeing what I want them to do that they don’t already do. Something that worked for them in high school doesn’t really work for math at the college level.”

In grading, Pemantle says that while the oral exam has been mandatory in his undergraduate class in the past, more recently it has been included as an optional portion of the final exam grade. Many students opt to take it.

Much like Remillard, he suggests thinking about the objective of an oral exam before diving in—and striking up conversations with other instructors who have tried it, before making the plunge.

“You shouldn’t just decide to do oral exams; you should do it because you think it’s going to get you somewhere and design it around that,” says Pemantle. “That’s true of every piece of teaching: Teach with intent. Oral exams are another feature of that.”

Karen M. Tani, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and the Seaman Family University Professor, with appointments at Penn Carey Law and in the Department of History at SAS, decided to conduct an oral exam for many of the same reasons in her undergraduate American legal history course, but also as part of a larger thought process about what evaluation looks like in the age of artificial intelligence.

“I was also thinking about how you test students in ways that give you a more calibrated sense of where they are,” she says. “Sometimes I think for certain paper assignments, it can be hard to tell that, in ways that if you have a conversation about the subject matter, you can tell if they are able to go further than you expect or maybe are stuck at basics and need to master those things. It seemed to me oral exams would be a good way to do that.”

Her oral exams typically last about 10 minutes and are a way for students to test ideas they may want to expand upon in their final exams. She bases grading on a scale of “check,” check-plus,” or “check-minus.”

And more simply, it’s an opportunity to interact with students in larger classes.

“It also feels like a really special way to actually connect to the student and see their growth over the semester. That feels more precious in some ways than what they’d write on an exam, because you can see their faces and engage the stores of knowledge they have in a different way,” Tani says.

Podcasts and projects

Across academia, podcasts have become a creative and conversational format for exploring complicated subjects. Penn Libraries offers a variety of resources for audio recording and editing and regularly hosts workshops about educational podcasting.

Chris Mustazza, co-director of the PennSound Archive and who teaches in the English Department at SAS, teaches two audio-centric courses about how to critically engage with audio, one of which is a hands-on course about how to make a podcast. Regularly, he says, he sees more student interest than he can meet, and from all disciplines across campus: from neuroscience to business. Most students, he explains, want more experience with mixing audio, and so become familiar with soundscapes and ambient sounds and more fundamentally think about how they tell a story. Their first assignment is to record themselves telling a story, immediately focusing the course on the act of creating.

Podcasting tends to give students tangible skills they can take elsewhere, Mustazza says, and is an accessible output they can refer to beyond the life of the course. One student later wrote to him conveying that they used a sample assignment from Mustazza’s class for an application to business school.

“They’ll say they use it in other classes from then on, and if they get an opportunity to do something with sound, they’ll do it,” Mustazza says.

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Lisa Park, a lecturer in the Undergraduate Fine Arts & Design Department in the Weitzman School of Design, teaches a course called Design 21, which introduces the latest trends in art, design, and technology—including AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, 3-D Printing, and data visualization. Park organizes group, project-based assignments centered on collaboration and familiarizing students with AI and design tools. Students have done everything from using AI to design jewelry for a magazine cover that is then made using a 3-D printer, to creating board games. The assignments have the function of teaching students to use tools and simultaneously, in the case of AI tools like image generators, see AI’s potential for both innovation and misuse.

“What’s great about Penn is all these resources are free to students, which is really great because not a lot of universities provide those resources for free,” Park says. “Laser cutting, 3-D printers, all these resources I want them to use, most of them have never used before.”

Tex Kang, program coordinator for technology and play, says the Education Commons makerspace, located in the George A. Weiss Pavilion at Franklin Field, typically works directly with four or five courses per semester that use the space, but that faculty are frequently coming for ideas about assignments. Education Commons offers free access of its resources to Penn students, faculty, and staff for 3-D printing, robotics kits, vinyl cutting, 3-D scanners, and more. It even has a portable tabletop loom.

Trial tips for new assignments

Turner says that, whether considering oral exams, a podcast, or any other creative assignment, it’s best to start small—especially if time is a concern. For example, ask students to do a seven-minute podcast and not an hour-long one. “What’s oftentimes reasonable for you to listen to and to grade is reasonable for the students,” she says.

Turner also recommends planning in advance rather than incorporating a new assignment mid-semester and being very clear with students from the get-go about how an assignment is being assessed. It will also be helpful to ask colleagues about their own experiences while trying new assignment types.

And for podcasts: “Don’t have your student do a podcast because it’s cool and everybody’s doing podcasts; think about what a podcast does, and what they learn through the process of creating that podcast,” she says. “And if that aligns with what your course is supposed to teach them, then it’s great.”

Instructors eager to learn more about course design and assignment development can attend the Course Design Institute, a three-day set of interactive workshops for faculty who are creating a new course or revising an existing one. This year’s institute takes place from May 20-22.