Course Design

This page is intended to provide elaboration on the concepts and tasks outlined in the Quality Course Framework Tutorial, a joint venture between CTLE, TLT, and the Marriott Library to provide instructors with support in creating, teaching, and assessing their courses.

What is course design?

Course design is the process an instructor must go through at the start of any course to plan for successful student outcome. If you, as the instructor of the course, want your course to be effective, there are a few questions that you must ask before you even think about objectives, activities, assessments, and constructing a course syllabus. You need to determine your governing values (basically your teaching philosophy statement), who your students and course are (situational factors), the overarching goal(s) for your students, what you want your students to understand, and the essential questions your students should be able to answer by the end of the course (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005; Fink, 2005). After you have answered these questions, then you can articulate your learning objectives, determine potential assessments, and then decide what instructional strategies and activities (learning plan) you will do with the students to help them meet the objectives. The next step can then be to plan your course content and construct your course schedule and syllabus.

Backward Course Design

Designing a course takes extensive planning and using the framework of backward course design in combination with an understanding of adult learning principles can help instructors create a course that fosters a community of learners. As Covey (1989) states, “To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understanding where you are now so that the steps you take are always in the right direction (p. 98).

Using a backward course design requires the instructor to focus on successful student outcome by determining measurable objectives, and then planning assessments that will assist the instructor in determining if the students have met the objectives. After the assessment has been determined, the instructor works backward to plan the learning activities that will lead the students toward successful completion of the assessment. Using adult learning principles to guide the creation of the objectives, assessments, and learning activities creates a community of learners all working toward a common goal. As adults learners they need to know why they should learn something, they need self-direction in their learning, they need to learn experientially, learn those things they need to know, approach learning as problem solving, and most of all, they need motivation to learn (Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 2005).

Backward design is going to the end and deciding what you want the students to be able to do and then going backwards to design the course to achieve the goals and objectives you laid out. These models are centered on the alignment of objectives, assessment, and teaching and learning activities. The backward course design models as described in Wiggins and McTighe (2005) and Fink (2005), provide you with excellent tools and templates to design your course.

The Steps of Backward Course Design

Step 1: Determining your Governing Values: What guides your life and decision making? This is a great place to begin when writing or reviewing your teaching philosophy. Read more about governing values in this article by Smith, specifically Laws 2 & 3.

Step 2: Situational Factors: An initial step in designing a course is to size up the situation carefully. Review information about the teaching and learning situation and, in some cases, gather additional information. Situational factors provide the backdrop against which important decisions about the course will be made. There are a number of potentially important situational factors that affect the design of the course. Articulate in writing what your course is about. Is it a totally online course, or a hybrid course (half online-half face to face)? How does your course fit into the bigger program picture? Why is this course important for students? Why do students need to take this course? How will an online, hybrid, or face-to-face format help students learn what they need to learn in this course? Identify situational factors related to the kind of course you are planning and this may help you articulate the specifics of your course (Fink, 2005).

Step 3: Stage 1: Desired Results, Established Goal(s)
First reflect on the overarching goal(s) of your course. What is your mission, your biggest wish for the students, the big thing you want students to be able to do or know at the end of your course? What do you want and hope your students to be, to have, or to have learned? What would distinguish students who have taken this course from students who have not?

Step 4: Stage 1: Desired Results, Understandings
Once you have articulated your established goal(s) you need to determine and write the understandings for your course that will help your students achieve the big goal(s). Before you can write your course objectives, you need to articulate what you want your students to understand by the end of the course. “What are the big ideas? What specific understandings about them are desired? What misunderstandings are predictable” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 22)?

Step 5: Stage 1: Desired Results, Essential Questions
What essential questions do you want your students to be able to answer by the end of your course? “What provocative questions will foster inquiry, understanding, and transfer of learning” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 22)? Determine questions that the understandings will answer.

Step 6: Stage 1: Desired Results, Course Objectives

Objectives must be measurable - these are how you will know the students have learned what they should have learned.
Objectives usually start with an action verb; that explicitly describes what students will do. Do not use vague words like understand and know.
Objectives are a single sentence statement. Objectives should focus on what the student will do not what the instructor does.
Objectives should focus on different levels of learning, not just on acquiring content knowledge.

Step 7: Stage 2: Assessment Evidence (Phase III)
The backward design orientation suggests that we think about a unit or course in terms of the collected assessment evidence needed to document and validate that the desired learning has been achieved, not simply as content to be covered or as a series of learning activities” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 18).

You need to determine what tools to use that will best determine if your students have met each of the objectives. Writing the objectives and then determining assessments will help you align the learning plan (Phases I & II) with the objectives and create activities that help your students successfully complete the course.

Step 8: Stage 3: Learning Plan (Phase I and Phase II)
Now, you need to design teaching and learning activities that are aligned to the assessments and the objectives.

What learning experiences and instruction will enable students to achieve the desired results? How will the design:

Help them know what is expected and where the unit is going?
Hook all students and hold their interest?
Prepare them to experience key ideas and explore issues?
Provide opportunities to rethink and revise their understandings?
Allow them to evaluate their work and its implications?
Meet the needs, interests and abilities of learners?
Be organized to maximize sustained engagement and effective learning? (adapted from Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).

Step 9: Sequencing Course Content

After following the steps above you should find that you are confident in articulating what you want your students to know and the essential questions you want them to be able to answer. You will also have a list of objectives and assessments that you draw from to build individual lesson plans. However, you may be asking yourself, how do I decide which topic to start with? Because learning is rarely linear, and deep understandings inevitably involve making connections across concepts, it can be daunting to decide how to sequence the content in your course. Stoller and Grabe (1997) propose a “Six-T’s” approach to course design that is particularly helpful for deciding how to sequence course content. This approach was originally described as a model for integrating language and content instruction for language teachers and teachers who work in content areas (such as science or math) but who teach language learners. However, the approach can be adapted to all content areas.

The six T’s are: themes, texts, topics, threads, tasks, and transitions. A full description of each area can be found in the original article by Stoller and Grabe, A Six T's Approach to Content Based Instruction. For the purposes of addressing how to sequence course content the most important areas for you to consider now are themes, topics, threads, and transitions, each of which is described below.

Themes/Units are defined by the big ideas and essential questions that you want your students to be able to answer at the end of the semester.

Topics are the “subunits of content”, (Stoller & Grabe, 1997; p. 83) that are derived from each theme. For example, a theme that addresses an essential question about DNA in an introductory level biology class might have the structure of DNA and DNA replication as topics.

Threads are generally abstract concepts that connect themes and create coherence in a course. For example, “describe the mechanisms and implications of change in a system over time” could be a theme for an introductory biology course. Changes in biological systems can be described from the level of intracellular processes, to physiologic processes, to ecosystem dynamics. If you have identified an essential question for your course that students can only answer fully at the end of the entire course and that requires synthesis across the themes, then you have identified a potential thread for your course.

Transitions are activities or tasks that help students to make connections between topics in any particular theme.

How should all of this information help you to sequence your course? Using the diagram below it is easy to see that by defining your course in terms of themes and threads you will start to make decisions about which big ideas are unifying (threads) and which big ideas represent discrete sets of knowledge (themes). After making this decision you might want to ask yourself the following questions in order to determine which theme to start with (some questions will be more easily answered than others!):

The 6 T’s Approach to Course Design
Diagram by Sarah Braden, based on the 6Ts model (Stoller & Grabe, 1997)

1.) Does success in developing an understanding in any one theme clearly rely on an understanding of another? If so, then these should be sequenced so that the foundational knowledge comes first.

2.) Do the assessments that I have planned have a relationship to each other that requires one before the other? If so, then the relevant themes in which these assessments are included should be sequenced to support this.

3.) What outside resources (trips into the field, lab experiences, guest speakers, etc.) will I use in each theme and are any of them time sensitive? If so then this may influence your sequence of themes.

Once you have made a decision about the sequence of themes, you should use the same process to sequence topics within each theme. Even if you are using a textbook it is a good idea to go through this process of deciding which topics should be addressed before others – remember, there is no one correct answer! Once your topics are sequenced, remembering to use transitions while lesson planning will also add coherence to the sequence of topics in your course.

Remember it is very important that you think first about what you want to achieve (the objective), then secondly think about how you will assess the objectives, and finally think about what activities would be best for doing that before selecting any technology tools to use in your lesson. This is the same whether you are designing a face-to-face course, an online course, or a hybrid course. Design the course first then determine how you will deliver the information!

Designing a New Course or Breathing Life into an Old One

CTLE hosted a workshop entitled Designing a New Course or Breathing Life into an Old One. You can view the PowerPoint slides for this workshop below.

Workshop Materials

Detailed Alignment Grid

CTLE Workshop Presentation Slides
June 2012

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