What is Integrated Course Design?

(And what is its relationship to significant learning?)

Integrated course design is a special way of approaching the task of designing a course. Teachers who become serious about wanting to promote significant learning, will have to learn how to incorporate a number of powerful teaching ideas into their courses of instruction. The model of integrated course design enables teachers to do just that.

This model includes attention to components that are present in most all models of instructional design, e.g., learning goals, learning activities, methods of assessment, etc.; however, it goes beyond other models and is distinct from them in four (4) ways:

• It emphasizes the need for the components to be aligned or integrated with each other, and shows how to achieve this.
• It is capable of showing where several major ideas on good teaching (e.g. active learning, educative assessment, teaching strategies) fit into the overall design of courses.
• It offers specific criteria for determining whether individual components and the whole course have been designed well or not.
• In terms of its general structure, it is an interactive model rather than a linear model.

This last feature can be seen in the following diagram of the basic components of integrated course design.

The fullest elaboration of the model of integrated course design (apart from Fink's book) is contained in the "Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning." (33 pp.) Click here to view the Self-Directed Guide as a Word document or in PDF form. It is intended to do two things:

• Lay out all the basic features and steps of integrated course design.
• Enable readers to actually use the model in the design (or redesign) of a particular course by providing the necessary questions and tools for each step of the process.