Course Design

General Course Design Principles

When designing a course, where do you begin? Perhaps you typically begin by identifying topics you’d like to address or texts you want to include. In this approach, the focus is primarily on content and coverage. However, covering a variety of topics doesn’t mean that students will necessarily learn them. If you want to be sure that students leave your course having learned particular concepts, skills, habits, and ways of thinking, it is helpful to begin your planning with the end in mind. This approach is called backward design.

What is backward design?

Backward design is a way of designing individual classes, entire courses or departmental curricula that ensures learning activities are aligned with objectives. It is called backward (or sometimes integrated) design because it works backwards from (1) broad learning goals and specific learning outcomes to (2) assessment strategies to (3) learning activities.

The backward design process has three stages, which can be framed as a series of questions:

1. Learning goals: What should students know or be able to do at the end of the course?

Consider these factors when you create the learning goals:

• Academic connections: Is your class part of a series or a prerequisite for another class? If so, what skills or knowledge are required for success in subsequent classes? What departmental learning goals does your class meet? What are the expected outcomes?
• Workforce preparation: Does your class prepare students for some aspect of their lives or future work experience?

2. Assessment strategies: What are the best ways for students to show they have reached each learning goal?

Consider these factors when you create the assessment strategies:

• Authentic assessment: Are there ways that students can show proficiency that mirror what they will be asked to do in a work setting or other discipline-specific environment?
• Reflection: How can you ask students to demonstrate that they not only have mastered the concept or skill, but also why it is important to learn?
• Student self-assessment: Are there intermediate strategies that will help students determine how much they have learned and if there are any learning gaps?

3. Learning activities: How can students prepare to reach each learning goal?

Consider these factors when you create the learning activities:

• Balance: What is the best way to balance classroom time with homework assignments and class projects? Should you consider a specific type of strategy for one or more class sessions, so you can facilitate activities in more depth and resolve challenges as they arise?
• Application: If you want students to leave your class with real-world skills, is there a way to have them perform an appropriate activity for a campus unit at SCU or some external organization?

Creating Content for Course Design

As you design your course, you may want to incorporate different kinds of multimedia content. Creating videos, narrated slides, and other multimedia projects can be great ways to provide students with engaging, informative content that can be used in face-to-face, online, and blended courses. SCU offers a variety of tools and resources you can use to create your own content.

Creating Videos: Zoom is a video creation tool you can use for micro-lectures, welcome videos, assignment descriptions, and screen share videos. Check out this guide for recording with Zoom. Don’t worry about producing a perfectly polished video, but do keep in mind your learning objectives as you decide what you want to say during the video. You may want to begin the video with a quick overview of its goals and content and end the video with a summary and perhaps a question for reflection. For more tips on creating engaging micro-lecture videos, see this guide.

Creating Narrated Slides: VoiceThread, PowerPoint, and Google Slides are three tools you can use to create narrated slides for your students to watch. You likely already have the slide content, so adding your voice and narration to the content can replicate in-class lectures in an online, blended or flipped course. Check out this guide for recording with VoiceThread.

Finding Pre-Existing Content for Your Courses

Leveraging educational media that already exists can be a great way to supplement the original content you create for your face-to-face or online courses. Not sure where to start looking for content? Here are a few ideas:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are resources that are freely available and can be customized, combined, and distributed in a variety of ways. The SCU Library has a guide on OER which highlights various databases for finding resources. This guide from Humboldt State also offers discipline-specific OER resources (hover over the disciplinary clusters in the sidebar navigation to find resources for your content area). 

Here are some other OER resources to check out:

• Academic Earth - video lectures from many fields
• BigThink - video content from the experts in many fields
• Connexions - community for finding and sharing educational resources
• Khan Academy - self-paced tutorials, mainly on math and science topics
• Merlot - community for finding and sharing educational resources
• MIT OpenCourseware  - course content developed by MIT, including videos
• OER Commons - various OER materials
• Open Courseware Consortium - entire OER courses, resources, materials
• TED-Ed - portal for educators to create and share lessons

YouTube: Yes, YouTube may be your favorite source for cat videos, but it also houses some really solid educational content. Check out this list of YouTube channels which are known for producing engaging and informative videos related to a variety of content areas.

Podcasts: Podcasts can be a refreshing alternative to video, and since podcasts are frequently consumed in spurts and while doing other tasks, students may be more inclined to listen to a 60-minute podcast than to watch a 60-minute video. You can search podcasts by topic within Apple Podcasts and Spotify (two of the most popular podcast apps). A few podcasts which feature content relevant to a variety of content areas are Hidden Brain, 99% Invisible, Radiolab, Freakonomics, and Stuff You Should Know.

Students: Many students are quite skilled at finding multimedia online. You could assign students topics and ask them to find relevant videos, podcasts, infographics, images, articles, etc. After screening what students find, you could integrate these materials into your course and credit the students who found them. This would be a great way to engage students and give them a sense of ownership of the course.

Online or Hybrid Course Design

Teaching a course exclusively online or in a hybrid format means that you may need to reframe how you approach your course. Here are some important steps:

• Send a welcome email to your students
• Build introductory content (course introduction, syllabus, course structure) in Camino
• Build out the course content for your first few weeks
• Create a welcome video for your students
• Create a Zoom meeting to use for virtual office hours throughout the quarter
• Create opportunities for students to collaborate with each other

As with any course, beginning with the end in mind can be a good place to start. While your learning objectives for an online course may be the same as they would be in a face-to-face version of your course, your assessments and learning activities will need to work in a synchronous or asynchronous online medium. Additionally, you’ll want to think about how you can create community within your online course by providing opportunities for students to connect with you and with each other. Here are some ideas as to how you might facilitate learning activities, assessments, and community-building in the online classroom.

Task	Potential Approaches
Explaining a concept	Create a video or audio recording using Zoom or VoiceThread Create a Powerpoint with notes (either written notes or recorded notes) Post a pre-existing video or audio file  Write an explanation and post it as a Camino page  Post a pre-existing article that explains the concept
Facilitating whole group or small group discussions	Assign discussion questions to the class in Camino Assign discussion questions to small groups in Camino Ask students to work together on shared Google Docs (they can use comments and the chat function to exchange ideas)
Facilitating individual or small group practice/problem solving	Have students solve problems, create concept maps, and make graphic representations using Google Drawings or other programs Ask students to solve problems or create graphic representations on paper, take a photo, and upload their photo to a Camino assignment or discussion forum
Checking students’ understanding of concepts	Create quizzes in Camino or by using Google forms Use low-stakes assignments to monitor students’ engagement with assigned readings and videos
Fostering community	Engage with students in discussion forums Facilitate small-group interactions Create a course welcome video and invite students to introduce themselves using short videos

Additional Resources

Fink, D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. (2nd Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Conaway, T., & Schiefelbein, J. (2020). The human touch and your digital personality. Online Learning Consortium. 

Guo, P. J., Kim, J., & Rubin, R. (2014). How video production affects student engagement: An empirical study of MOOC videos. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Learning@ scale conference (pp. 41-50). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2556325.2566239

 

Page authors:

C.J. Gabbe, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences and member of the Faculty Collaborative

Lisa Chang, Faculty Development Program Manager

Kevin Kelly, Lecturer at San Francisco State University

Rachel Stumpf, former SCU Faculty Development Program Manager

Brian Larkin, SCU Instructional Technology Manager

Last updated:  April 16, 2024