A New Business Branding Course For a New College Semester.

I outline how I built my new Spring 2024 Business Branding college course for graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

This is a new course for me in the department, and all new classes must be built from scratch. Every faculty member who teaches has to build, adapt, and deliver a new course in their career. It's a normal part of faculty life.

As a clinical professor in my department, I focus on teaching and bringing real-world experiences of others and myself to my courses.

When I began teaching, I did not have a course-building model. My education did not prepare me for building a 16-week learning experience for students. Because of my sports coaching experience, I knew how to develop and deliver a sports training and development plan for soccer and rugby teams. One of my first pieces of feedback read, "Dr. Coumbe-Lilley is the worst teacher at UIC and should go hang himself!" I guess I upset that student. That was the single voice of 17 students in one of my first classes. The other 16 voices of feedback were positive, but this one stuck. The negative feedback often does.

What I share below has been years in development. It's a process outline of how I intend to teach this new course. It's not based on any particular model or philosophy. It's led by my belief that education, like sports training, should be specific, relevant, memorable and enable the learner to take action. Before I begin course planning I list the things I think I know with 80% certainty are factual assumptions.

The pictures below show you how I developed my course. I will show you how I:

• Construct an anticipatory profile of the students in the course
• Define a course design outline
• Consider key decisions
• Outline a single session design

My starting points are the course description and the student learning outcomes.

Course Description

Designed to help students build a coaching and/or consulting business for face-to-face and virtual clients. Course Information: Prerequisite(s): Acceptance into the concentration in Performance, Sport, and Exercise Psychology within the MS in Kinesiology or consent of the instructor.

Learning Outcomes

1.???? Start a business.

2.???? Develop an integrated marketing and sales strategy.

3.???? Develop a business growth plan.

4.???? Understand the essential elements for running a business.

5.???? Recognize habits that lead to business success.

After these, I figured out how to create a course valued at 1/12th of the total graduate student experience and 2.5% of the total credit hours in the undergraduate experience.

Creating value meant keeping several truths in mind as I developed the course.

I have never taught the perfect course. Not everything I tried went well. I have not always been the best version of myself in my teaching persona, and some of my ideas flopped.

Thankfully, UIC students are open-minded and forgiving, and so are my recent supervisors.

Last week I listened to a rerun Seth Godin interview on The Copywriter Podcast which is on my favorite listens because of the quality of the guests, insights, and opportunities the hosts and their guests provide their audience. Check it out!

Seth emphasized a professional must focus and experience multiple failures to learn and develop value and find ways to be useful to the change being sought. I nodded as I heard his voice remind me of what I knew.

To teach, I must fail because otherwise, I am not taking risks to improve. I might take risks at the margins or pilot a test, but improvement must be my goal; otherwise, my courses lack relevance, urgency, and importance to students.

My courses require I stay current with the world by talking to industry professionals, digesting industry news, and relevant peer reviewed research. Realizing this, I must refigure courses every semester. So, I must have a system to integrate new knowledge and appreciate the implications of the impact of course enhancements on the course conditions for optimal learning to occur.

The human body has not changed much in recent millennia. I teach courses in related yet different fields. My knowledge is always incomplete, and that’s just how it is. I let go, thinking about being an absolute expert. Instead, I seized on learning, growth, and value to others because this is dynamic and relevant to the present.

My fields change every 6-months or faster due to technological, economic, legislative, and industry developments. So, the system I used to develop a new course to accommodate my constraints has to allow for flexibility in design, delivery, and evaluation.

I aim in all my courses for personal growth and change to take place as the student defines it, and in doing this, some of my ideas achieved modest success, which is less than I find acceptable. I want high success for all students and greater skill acquisition, and I am fundamentally dissatisfied if I perceive my course fell short of my expectations, whether it is a new course or not.

While I am down the track in my teaching career, with awards and recognition for decent efforts. Even though I have 230 college courses and worked with about 2.8K students. I feel only two courses met my standards since 2019. I'm not a perfectionist. I am experienced. And I know the difference between when things go as expected and when they don't. I learn more when things don't go well.

Yes, most courses were okay by my average standards, but only two met my highest standards. How do I know this? The students showed me through feedback and reflection that I met my aim of creating course conditions, helping most students find the change they wanted for themselves because of their course experience.

I hope my process helps you develop courses that meet your teaching standards and create awesome student learning experiences.

I welcome feedback.