Course Design Toolkit

Simply put: at the end of the course, what do you want students to be able to say they accomplished, are able to do, or have experience with through the course experience? Often these goals are intangible: they could be skill development, or experiencing types of tasks encountered in the workforce or the discipline. Or they can be aligned with your program outcomes, your institution, standards from an accrediting body, or the expectations or standards set forth by your particular discipline.

For example, a course in a science field may have a stated objective of “Students will develop foundational skills in scientific inquiry and data analysis.” This is a goal that can be taken from several of the sources mentioned above. However, goals like this are often amorphous and lack any real mechanism for verification or specificity: how does one measure development of foundational skills? How many foundational skills are we discussing? From these goals we can craft tangible outcomes that we can use to determine how much students are learning. Outcomes, when crafted with care, should be the following:

1. Student-centered: Focus on what students will be able to do at the end of a part of the course, or the end of the course.
2. Specific and Measurable: Using active verbs (e.g. Classify, Compare, Evaluate) help outcomes provide the opportunity for instructors to observe student achievement and ability on concrete skill and knowledge development.
3. Aligned: An outcome should be tied back to course, programmatic, or institutional goals. Outcomes that are not tied back to larger goals can lead to confusion on the part of students.

Let’s write some outcomes. Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, we can write outcomes that meet all three of the criteria listed above. Depending on the level of your course and where your learners are, you will be looking at different levels of learning your students should be engaging in throughout your course.

Congratulations, you have goals and objectives! Expanding on this, you can break down your course by week/module/section to think through different topics and the outcomes students should meet. To do this, a good exercise to go through is creating a course map. What this can do is ensure that your course and modular outcomes all align with each other and contribute to the overall course goals. Remember: everything should contribute to the student being able to achieve the overall course outcomes.

Let’s think about evaluating those outcomes now.

You have outcomes. Now what? We need to think about evaluating student performance on those outcomes. Are they meeting the benchmarks? We need to have students provide evidence that appropriately shows they achieved the course’s learning outcomes. This leads to creating an assessment strategy.

Any assessment strategy rests on three types of assessment:

1. Diagnostic Assessment: These can happen before the course or before a unit to check students’ prior knowledge and inform an instructor’s strategy for teaching.
2. Formative Assessment: These are low-stakes and ongoing checks to ensure that students are learning, and we can either provide feedback or tweak our instruction.
3. Summative Assessment: These are more high-stakes to test mastery of material and evaluate achievement of outcomes.

Examples of these are:

Another thing to consider: how often are your students going to be asked to take a multiple-choice exam or write a research paper? Consider more authentic forms of assessment: authentic assessment encourages students to engage in real world application of course content. To get ideas for that, here is a version of Bloom’s Taxonomy that includes a series of assessments that fit with the level of learning related toa particular outcome.

Something important to remember: assessments need to align with your course outcomes. An assessment not aligned directly to an assessment amount to busy work. Below, use the matrix in an alignment exercise: Write your outcomes to the left, and then create an assessment strategy for each of your outcomes.

We have the end in mind with the course learning outcomes. We have the benchmarks we will use to ensure students are achieving them through our assessment strategy. How do we ensure they can meet those outcomes through the assessments? We need to plan out how we teach.

The first thing we need to think about is scaffolding. If we think about learning like a staircase, we have the start at the bottom in order to climb. Scaffolding the learning by beginning with the core or foundational concepts that work upwards into more complex knowledge and skills allow students to be sure of how the complex fits in and derives from the foundational.

Next, match the activity to the learning outcome and the assessment strategy you have. Some examples:

• Lecture + discussion for conceptual understanding
• Problem-based learning for application and analysis
• Collaborative projects for synthesis and evaluation
• Flipped classroom for active engagement

Active Learning Resource 

Let’s plan out a week of instruction, with outcomes, assessments, and learning activities.

Weekly Outcomes

List the outcomes for the week (these should be tied back to the course outcomes):

Assessment Strategy

How will students be assessed on their learning?

Learning Activities

What are the activities students will be engaging in and you use to teach?

Materials and Resources:

What will students need for the week or be useful?

Required Videos