DRAFT:

An InformalGuide to Course Design

Welcome to Stockton! You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know how to teach or design a course, but every college, and student audience, is different. This guide is meant to help you to tailor your courses to the unique environment that is Stockton while at the same time, reviewing some best practices in course design.

This guide is divided into the following sections:

  1. General course design
  2. Approaches
  3. Traditional
  4. Goal-Oriented
  5. Stockton: Understanding Your Audience
  6. Stockton Culture and General Profile of Students
  7. Special Audiences
  8. Additional Information to Aid with Course Design
  9. Selection of Goals
  10. Selection of Readings
  11. Advice on Course Revision
  12. Designing Special Courses
  13. Graduate Courses
  14. Summer Courses
  15. General Education (G) Courses
  16. Online and Hybrid Courses

I. General Course Design

A. Approaches

  1. The Traditional Approach:

Unless you earned ones of your degrees in the field of Education, chances are that you have never had formal training in course design. Many of us graduate successfully from our Ph.D. programs with very little, if any, training on how to actually teach and design a course. Yes, we apprentice, some of us becoming teaching assistants, and this allows us some experience, but the quality of the training that we receive in this manner is informal and unstandardized. For the most part, many of us have learned to teach through observation and participation; how to design syllabi through reading the ones that were handed to us throughout the years; and how to design a course by taking a multitude of courses on the way to earning our degrees, eventually designing and teaching our own mainlyusing trial and error as our primary learning tool. What results is called the “Traditional Approach” to course design.

The “Traditional Approach” goes something like this:

Method a: Text-Centered

  1. Selecting an appropriate textbook on the subject and/or enough essential readings to fill the length of the semester
  2. Arranging them in a logical order on the syllabus based on topic/concept/chronologically, etc…
  3. Designing your lectures/activities/discussions around the selected readings
  4. Designing tests/assignments that reflect the course materials
  5. Making sure that you have enough tests/assignments/papers to be able to give them a fair grade

Method b: Content-Centered

  1. Selecting the most important topics that you want to cover
  2. Selecting readings/book chapters that cover those topics
  3. Making sure that you have enough topics and readings to fill the semester
  4. Arranging the topics in a logical order on the syllabus
  5. Designing your lectures/activities around the topics on the syllabus
  6. Making sure that your tests/assignments cover what is on the syllabus and that there are enough of them to be able to assign a fair grade

Unintended consequences of these design methods is that they can result in courses that try to cover too much information, focus too much on simply learning factual information, or seem to lack a purpose or lack cohesion.

In both of these methods, the instructor usually has specific goals or outcomes in mind, but they are often implicit. What results is often a course that is difficult to assess in terms of whether or not it has met its goals and that is difficult to place within the curriculum in terms of student learning outcomes for the program.

  1. The Goal-Oriented Approach

The goal-oriented approach takes more effort on the part of the instructor in terms of preliminary planning, but is much more fruitful in the end in terms of making sure that the students are learning what you intended them to learn when you designed the course. The three models we will be covering in this section are “The Backward Design” model of Wiggins and McTighe (1998), the “Integrated Course Design” model of Fink (2003), and the “Cutting Edge Course Design” model of Tewksbury and MacDonald (2005).All three of the models covered in this section are based on the logical premise that one must choose specific learning outcomes for a course before choosing the content and related materials. All three models have been included because they have all been used successfully in higher education, and you may find one model to more “user friendly” than another. Any of these models can be used to develop new courses or redesign existing courses.

a. The Backward Design Model

Authors:Wiggins and McTighe, 1998

Description:Framework for designing courses that begins with desired outcomes of “enduring understandings” for students, and then works backwards to design evidence of that understanding, and then learning assessment activities to lead to such evidence.

The Process:

In the traditional approach to course design, the process is the following:

Design the lectures/earning experiences devise the tests/assessments of the materials coveredexamine results

Process for this model begins with the other end of the traditional process:

Identify desired resultsdevise tests assignments to assess those resultsdesign lectures learning experiences to get you to the desired results

The process is composed of three stages:

Stage 1:

Identify desired results: What are the goals of the course?

At this stage of the process you will establish course goals and reviewrelevant external and program curricular standards. This stage is not about simply listing objectives. It is about creating what Wiggins and McTighe call “enduring understandings.” In other words, what is worthy of requiring student understanding?

After years of immersing oneself in the nuances of a field, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between knowledge that is essential and knowledge that students should be familiar with. Wiggins and McTighe help to distinguish among the following categories: “knowledge worth being familiar with” (What do you want students to encounter during these 15 weeks?), “important knowledge” (Would you consider the course or learning unit incomplete if the students didn’t master these essential skills or concepts?), and “enduring understandings” (What do we want them to remember or understand long after they have forgotten the rest?).

The first category is usually fairly easy to recognize, but instructors often have difficulty distinguishing between what is “important” and what is “enduring.” Because of this, Wiggins and McTighe came up with four questions to ask of the concept/skill/idea.

  1. "To what extent does the idea, topic, or process represent a 'big idea' having enduring value beyond the classroom?" What knowledge would serve them in other aspects of their lives, or 10, 20, or 30 years from now?
  2. "To what extent does the idea, topic, or process reside at the heart of the discipline?" To what extent is this an essential skill for the discipline?
  3. "To what extent does the idea, topic, or process require uncoverage?" These are concepts that students frequently have difficulty grasping, struggle with or are likely to have misconceptions about.
  4. "To what extent does the idea, topic, or process offer potential for engaging students?" These are idea or concepts that are inherently interesting to the students but can serve as doorways to other big ideas.

Enduring understandings encompass not only the “big ideas” at the heart of a given discipline but also those ideas that have value beyond the classroom—the knowledge and skills that will inform students' thoughts and actions when they graduate from school. Implicit in this notion of enduring understandings is the suggestion that these are the ideas and processes with a broad intellectual focus and with the most potential for motivating student interest and engagement. What would you want your students to know about X five years down the road? What "understanding" about X would "endure" even as their own situations or technology change?

Understanding is multidimensional, and defined by six facets: the ability to explain (how things work, what they imply, where they connect, and why they happened), to interpret (make sense of, show the significance of, decode), to apply (using it, adapting it, and customizing it), to have perspective (weigh different plausible explanations and interpretations, examining from different points of view), to empathize (try to understand another person, people, or culture by imagining one is in their shoes), and to have self-knowledge (understand themselves). Those of you familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy (Bloom, 1956) will see elements of Bloom’s higher order thinking skills in this taxonomy, such as analysis, application, synthesis and evaluation.

Although not expressly addressed by Wiggins and McTighe, because some programs are already rigidly structured, many courses serve as prerequisites for other courses. This is especially true in the pre-professional programs. If this is the case, it is advised that this stage of the process be included in curriculum design at a program level for these types of courses, as this process can affect the consideration of content in other courses in the program.

Stage 2:

This stage is about assessing progress in the course. At this point, you must determine what constitutes acceptable evidence. What would demonstrate competency or gains in student understanding? According to Wiggins and McTighe, you must be able to answer this question before you even begin to plan teaching and learning experiences. You have to know what evidence you are going to be looking for throughout the semester.

You must be able to assess students’ ability to meet the learning goals, both at the beginning of the course and throughout the course. Are they getting it? What progress are they making? What kinds of assessments will enable students to demonstrate that they are making progress toward the course’s learning goals?

For example, if you are trying to assess understanding as the ability to explain, then you could use assignments and assessments that require them to explain what they know by using verbs such as “support, justify, and prove.” As part of this ability to explain, students should also be able to give good reasons in support of their explanations. This requires students to link specific facts with larger concepts and to justify the connections; this requires more than giving an answer based on recall.

To clarify, this stage is not about endless tests. This stage uses formative assessment to providestudents with frequent, informal opportunities to re-think and revise. Learning from mistakes leads to ongoing improvement in understanding. This is very different from summative assessment. Summative assessment “sums up” a student’s performance with a grade at the end of a particular effort (unit, course) and is equivalent to the “test” at the end of the module or unit.

The stage also focuses on fit and feasibility of assessments, on giving assignments and tests that test the learning you value most. Do your tests and assignments fit the learning goals you have set? Are your assessments giving students the opportunity to demonstrate whatever knowledge and skill you want them to acquire? Also, are your assessments feasible for both you and your students? Is the workload you are planning reasonable, strategically placed and sustainable?

This last question is important. The maximum number of students in most undergraduate courses at Stockton is 35. Because of Stockton’s growth, most courses are now run with the maximum enrollment. You will be teaching 3 courses per semester, each with a likely enrollment of 35 students. If you have 5 assignments in a course, plus one revision for each, that makes 350 assignments that you must grade just for that one course during the semester. If you add any tests on top of this, the number increases. Now multiply whatever number you have by 3. This is the number of assignments that you will not only have to grade, but hand back within a reasonable amount of time. Remember that a student’s concept of “a reasonable amount of time” is equivalent to “immediately” in today’s instant gratification society. Add to this the amount of service that is expected of faculty at Stockton and the growing research expectations and you have a recipe for disaster.

Also remember that the point of this type of feedback is to assess whether or not the students are “getting it.” If you are struggling just to do the grading, then you are not leaving yourself enough time to figure out why students may not be showing the type of progress that you expected. A better way to conceptualize this type of assessment is to think of it as not just graded assignments and tests, but as encompassing observation, dialogue, tasks, projects, self-assessments, and in-class prompts.Wiggins and McTighe divide these assessments into three categories:1).Performance Task: This task is meant to be a real-world challenge in the thoughtful and effective use of knowledge and skill gained in the course. 2) Criteria-Referenced Assessment (quizzes, test, prompts).These provide instructor and student with feedback on how well the facts and concepts are being understood. 3) Unprompted Assessment and Self-Assessment (observations, dialogues, etc.). Unprompted assessments are better for the purpose of formative assessment, while criteria-references assessments such as tests or exams are better for summative and for assessing basic knowledge. Performance tasks and projects are more efficient at assessing understanding than tests because they force the student to apply knowledge within a specific context.

For some interesting ways of conducting formative assessment, follow this link:

For an overview of the design of grading rubrics, which make your life easier while allowing you to give students informative feedback about their work and give them an idea of what you will be looking for, follow this link:

Stage 3:

This stage requires that the instructor plan learning experiences and instruction. In other words, how are the students going to practice their learning? Which approaches promote understanding, interest, and competency in the subject matter?

The following questions can be used to help you to devise learning experiences:

  1. “What enabling knowledge and skills will students need to perform effectively and achieve desired results?”
  2. “What activities will equip students with the needed knowledge and skills?”
  3. “What will need to be taught and coached, and how should it best be taught, in light of performance goals?”
  4. “What materials and resources are best suited to accomplish these goals?”
  5. “Is the overall design efficient and effective?’

It is stage that you decide what methods and materials are best suited to your goals, and the proper sequence of lessons. Make sure that yourmaterials and learning activities support the goals of the course that you created in Stage 1. Point your students to exactly what you want them to learn and provide them with a strong foundational structure on which to build further learning by presenting content in a well-organized fashion.What are the best problems or questions for developing your students’ ability to meet your learning goals? How can they practice engaging content and skillfully using their new learning?

For those of you who find this process a bit abstract and would like more concrete examples and templates, there is a workbook available. Part of the workbook with useable templates and exercises is also available online at:

For an introduction to Wiggins and McTighe’s book, here is a link to the first chapter:. Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. "What is Backward Design?," in Understanding by Design. 1st edition, UpperSaddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall, 2001, pp. 7-19. A copy of the entire book is available at the IFD office.

b. The Integrated Course Design Model

Author: L. Dee Fink (2003)

Description: According to Dr. Fink, “The basic components in this model of Integrated Course Design are the same as those found in other models of instructional design: analyze the situational factors, formulate the learning goals, design the feedback and assessment procedures, and select the teaching/learning activities. What is distinctive about this model is that these components have been put together in a way that reveals and emphasizes their inter-relatedness.”(Fink, 2003)

This model has the same basic building blocks of that of Wiggins and McTighe (1998). The primary difference is that this model incorporates the idea of situational factors or context in its planning stages and is more explicit about the relationships between the individual components of the model. The other main difference is that the Backward Design model is more easily adapted to individual units of instruction, whereas the Integrated Course Design model focuses on integrating specific learning experiences into an entire course. The two also use different taxonomies of student learning or understanding.

Process:

This process is divided into three phases: the initial design phase, the intermediate design phase, and the final design phase.