Course Design Series (Post 0 of N): A New Course

This fall I will again be Instructor of Record.  My appointment is to teach CS 4392 - Programming Languages.  This is an unusual situation in that the course has not been taught for over 5 years (last time was Fall 2009).  Effectively, the course will have to be designed afresh.

The first step in course design (following L. Dee Fink and McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Chapter 2) is to write the learning objectives using the course description, along with prerequisites and courses that require this one.  Let's review what we have:

Course Description: none

Prerequisites:
Undergraduate Semester level CS 2340 (which has the following description)
Object-oriented programming methods for dealing with large programs. Focus on quality processes, effective debugging techniques, and testing to assure a quality product.

Courses depending on this: none

Alright.  Now I will turn to the CS curriculum at Georgia Tech.  Georgia Tech uses a concept they call "threads", which are sets of related courses.  CS 4392 is specifically in the Systems and Architecture thread.  This provides several related courses:

CS 4240 - Compilers, Interpreters, and Program Analyzers
Study of techniques for the design and implementation of compilers, interpreters, and program analyzers, with consideration of the particular characteristics of widely used programming languages.

CS 6241 - Compiler Design
Design and implementation of modern compilers, focusing upon optimization and code generation.

CS 6390 -  Programming Languages
Design, structure, and goals of programming languages. Object-oriented, logic, functional, and traditional languages. Semantic models. Parallel programming languages.

Finally, the ACM has provided guidelines for the CS curriculum.  Not only does this provide possible options for what material I should include, but they have also provided several ACM exemplar courses (c.f., http://www.cs.rochester.edu/courses/254/fall2013/ and http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse341/13sp/).

To summarize, if my first step is to write the learning objectives, then I am on step 0: write the course description.  In a couple of weeks, I plan on finishing my initial review of potential textbooks as well as the other materials covered above.  That will provide me the groundwork for the description and then objectives.