Tips on Teaching: Designing a Course

A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning (Word document). This document (consisting of 33 pages) does two things: It integrates all the components of good course design, as described in the other individual links on this page. It leads you through each of the key steps needed to design a course in such a way that your students can achieve significant learning. (Note: The ideas in this guide are taken from Dee Fink's book on Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses, Jossey-Bass, 2003)

Planning Your Course: A Decision Guide. (Word document). How do you put together a good course? Putting together a course is a matter of making a series of decisions about the course. This "Planning Guide" (8 pages) helps a teacher work through these decisions in a systematic way. The guide also includes two forms that are helpful in this process.

Instructional Design Process. A general model of the Instructional Design Process that identifies the three major areas of decision when putting a course together.

Significant Learning. (Word document). When formulating goals for a course, teachers need to identify significant kinds of learning goals. This essay presents a taxonomy of SIGNIFICANT LEARNING that offers a way of identifying WHAT you want students to learn.

Active Learning. When selecting teaching/learning activities, teachers must make choices about HOW they want students to learn. This essay presents a model of ACTIVE LEARNING that offers specific ways of doing this.

Educative Assessment. When deciding how to provide Feedback and Assessment for student learning, teachers need to do this in a way that goes beyond grading to also helping the learning process. This essay provides a model of educative assessment. These procedures will create EDUCATIVE ASSESSMENT, i.e., assessment that enhances the learning process.

Tips on Designing Extraordinary Courses. This is a short list of specific suggestions on course design in general and on the three decision areas in particular.