Course Designed: Effective Communication Skills for Supervisors and Managers
Course Background: Currently, I teach courses at the community college level concerning communication skills. My hope is to use some elements of these courses that I have designed and develop a course in effective communication skills for new supervisors at a company where I will soon be employed as part of my instructional design work.
Course Description and Learning Context: Learners will engage in a ten week course to improve their communication skills as they assume new positions in the company as supervisors. The course is designed to be practical and includes skills in both written and verbal communication through ten modules which introduce learners to basic communication skills and techniques for improving their communication with employees and customers.
Things that are working well in my course: Positive elements of the course include weekly journal assignments. The journal assignments are to be completed but are not graded. This factor hopefully permits the learners to be more comfortable writing since they know they are not being graded. This element is included in the new course and provides the supervisors-to-be an opportunity to journal about their experiences on the job. Another element of the course that works well is the section on e-mail communication and netiquette. I have adapted that section as part of the communication skills course module 4 on written communication.
Things that I’d like to change about my course: I would like to further develop the modules about spoken communication and include such topics as listening skills or active listening, dealing with difficult persons, communicating feedback, and communicating to motivate employees. In addition, I would like to use elements of the college English composition courses in this course and add a module on technical writing or writing for the work place. As mentioned above, I have kept the e-mail module and planned a module on writing employee evaluations but also would like to include modules on writing goals and writing training manuals.
The most frustrating or irritating aspect of my course is: The most frustrating aspect of the current course is motivating learners to complete work on time and to follow directions carefully. These frustrations will probably carry over into the new course as the supervisors are not always motivated especially since the course is not graded. To encourage motivation, I have tried to connect each module with actual situations in the workplace through using Horton’s Connect activities and including references to plans and policies of the workplace. The challenge is to design the course so that is relevant to the work place and contains content that the supervisors will find worth their time. This is an ongoing process.
The most time consuming aspect of my course is: The most time consuming aspect of the current course is providing feedback on learners’ projects and also making sure links are valid. I do plan to follow Robin Smith’s suggestion about avoiding link rot by creating a spreadsheet that contains hyper links to the web pages used and checking them monthly.
Course Background: Currently, I teach courses at the community college level concerning communication skills. My hope is to use some elements of these courses that I have designed and develop a course in effective communication skills for new supervisors at a company where I will soon be employed as part of my instructional design work.
Course Description and Learning Context: Learners will engage in a ten week course to improve their communication skills as they assume new positions in the company as supervisors. The course is designed to be practical and includes skills in both written and verbal communication through ten modules which introduce learners to basic communication skills and techniques for improving their communication with employees and customers.
Things that are working well in my course: Positive elements of the course include weekly journal assignments. The journal assignments are to be completed but are not graded. This factor hopefully permits the learners to be more comfortable writing since they know they are not being graded. This element is included in the new course and provides the supervisors-to-be an opportunity to journal about their experiences on the job. Another element of the course that works well is the section on e-mail communication and netiquette. I have adapted that section as part of the communication skills course module 4 on written communication.
Things that I’d like to change about my course: I would like to further develop the modules about spoken communication and include such topics as listening skills or active listening, dealing with difficult persons, communicating feedback, and communicating to motivate employees. In addition, I would like to use elements of the college English composition courses in this course and add a module on technical writing or writing for the work place. As mentioned above, I have kept the e-mail module and planned a module on writing employee evaluations but also would like to include modules on writing goals and writing training manuals.
The most frustrating or irritating aspect of my course is: The most frustrating aspect of the current course is motivating learners to complete work on time and to follow directions carefully. These frustrations will probably carry over into the new course as the supervisors are not always motivated especially since the course is not graded. To encourage motivation, I have tried to connect each module with actual situations in the workplace through using Horton’s Connect activities and including references to plans and policies of the workplace. The challenge is to design the course so that is relevant to the work place and contains content that the supervisors will find worth their time. This is an ongoing process.
The most time consuming aspect of my course is: The most time consuming aspect of the current course is providing feedback on learners’ projects and also making sure links are valid. I do plan to follow Robin Smith’s suggestion about avoiding link rot by creating a spreadsheet that contains hyper links to the web pages used and checking them monthly.