When faculty are tasked with designing their courses, they are often starting from scratch. In addition to creating the learning outcomes, they have to source the materials, design course activities and assessments, and develop course policies. While they are doing all of this, a question that is top of mind is: “Is this rigorous enough?” or “Are my standards high enough?”

Often, as educators, we can conflate intellectual rigor with logistical rigor. Logistical Rigor was first introduced to me through reading the work of Dr. Kevin Gannon. In his research, he poses the idea that faculty introduce policies or expectations that make a course difficult in order to increase the “rigor” without realizing the impact it can have on a student’s cognitive bandwidth. In other words, for every minute a student has to spend figuring out how to turn in an assignment or figuring out how to find an obscure research text online is less energy they cannot spend on actually interacting with theyour course content. So, what are some examples of intellectual rigor and logistical rigor?

Logistical Rigor (Bad Hard) 

Intellectual Rigor (Good Hard) 

When students think about the difficulty of a course, they will ask themselves, “How hard is it to get an A?” A lot of the time, logistical rigors like the ones listed above can be what makes the course feel hard without the students engaging in intellectual work. Removing logistical rigor won’t water down the course, instead it will free up time for students to engage with some of the intellectual work you want them to! 

Dr Kevin Gannon poses the following questions for faculty to ask themselves in the course design process in his article titled, Why the Calls for a Return to Rigor are Wrong: 

• Does a nonnegotiable attendance policy genuinely advance learning?
• Does an inflexible deadline policy for all assignments strengthen learning?
• Is learning furthered by tests with a lot of questions and a relatively brief time limit?
• Does a pedagogical strategy that relies exclusively on lectures promote learning?

Strategies to Implement Right Away

D2L Stress Test 

• What is it: a user experience audit of your D2L course site 
• Action: use the student view in your course site to see the student experience.  Can you find the week’s readings and assignments in three  clicks or less? You can do this yourself or work with CTL’s Learning Experience Research team. Read more about the work they are doing in this blog post. 
• Impact: help you identify stumbling blocks for students that get in the way of learning

Rubrics 

• What is it: a scoring tool that identifies learning outcomes and criteria for assignments 
• Action: include a rubric for all assignments in order to make your expectations clear. Example rubrics are available on the Teaching Commons.  Your Learning Experience Designer can also work with you to design one for a specific assignment. 
• Impact: This will reduce the hidden curriculum and help your students understand why you are having them complete the assigned work. It might also make it easier for you to grade. 

Provide Students with Options for Expression and Communication

• What is it: a Universal Design for Learning guideline that encourages instructors to allow for multiple ways for students s