The following solution is excerpted from Tomorrow's Professor and gives some excellent tips on what to do when preparing to teach a course for the first time.  It is by Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University, and Rebecca Brent, Education Designs, Inc., and  is from Chem. Engr. Education, Spring 2007, 41(2), 121-122.

A rational approach to new course preparation.

1. Start preparing as soon as you know you'll be teaching a particular course.

Dedicate a paper file folder and a folder on your computer to the course and begin to assemble ideas and instructional materials. While you're teaching the course, continue to file ideas and resources as you come up with them.

2. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Identify a colleague who is a good teacher and has taught the course you're preparing to teach, and ask if he/she would be willing to share course materials with you. (Most faculty members would be fine with that request.) In addition, try finding the course on the MIT OpenCourseWare Web site (<http://ocw.mit.edu>) and download materials from there. Open courseware may contain visuals, simulations, class activities, and assignments that can add considerably to the quality of a course and would take you months or years to construct from scratch. The first time you teach the course, borrow liberally from the shared materials and note after each class what you want to change in future offerings. Also consider asking TA's to come up with good instructional materials and/or inviting students to do it for extra credit.

3. Write detailed learning objectives, give them to the students as study guides, and let the objectives guide the construction of lesson plans, assignments, and tests.

Learning objectives are statements of observable tasks that students should be able to accomplish if they have learned what the instructor wanted them to learn. Felder and Brent recommend giving objectives to students as study guides for tests ,  and show an illustrative study guide for a midterm exam.

Before you start to prepare a section of a course that will be covered on a test, draft a study guide and use it to design lessons (lectures and in-class activities ) and assignments that provide instruction and practice in the tasks specified in the objectives. As you get new ideas for things you want to teach, add them to the study guide. One to two weeks before the test, finalize the guide and give it to the students, and then draw on it to design the test. The course will then be coherent, with mutually compatible lessons, assignments, and assessments. Instead of having to guess what you think is important, the students will clearly understand your expectations, and those with the ability to complete the tasks specified in the objectives will be much more likely to do so on the test. In other words, more of your students will have learned what you wanted them to learn. The objectives will also help you avoid trying to cram everything known about the subject into your lecture notes. If you can't think of anything students might do with content besides memorize and repeat it, consider either dropping that content or cutting down on it in lectures, giving yourself more time to spend on higher-level material.

4. Get feedback during the course.

It's always a good idea to monitor how things are going in a class so you can make mid-course corrections, particularly when the course is new. Every so often collect "minute papers," in which the students anonymously hand in brief statements of what they consider to be the main points and muddiest points of the class they just sat through. In addition, have them complete a survey four or five weeks into the semester in which they list the things you're doing that are helping their learning and the things that are hindering it. Look for patterns in the responses to these assessments and make adjustments you consider appropriate, or make a note to do so next time you teach the course.

5. Do everything you can to minimize new preps early in your career, and especially try to avoid having to deal with several of them at a time.

Some department heads inconsiderately burden their newest faculty members with one new prep after another. If you find yourself in this position, politely ask your head to consider letting you teach the same course several times before you move on to a new one so that you have adequate time to work on your research. Most department heads want their new faculty to start turning out proposals and papers in their first few years and will be sympathetic to such requests. It might not work, but as Rich's grandmother said when told that chicken soup doesn't cure cancer, it couldn't hurt.