Top Ten Strategies for Designing Courses

Category: Course and Curriculum Design

1. Plan ahead! Excellence happens by design, and the more time invested in structuring the course and preparing for the lessons, the better. Consider what prerequisites are essential for student success.
2. Implement Universal Design for Learning into your course structure. UDL helps remove learning barriers for all students.
3. Ensure that all directions, guidelines, policies, grading criteria, readings, and resources are accessible and available to students in more than a single place and format.
4. Understand your students, your target audience. Be aware of special needs, special interests, understand the diversity they represent, get a sense of what they know already about the subject, and what they want to know.
5. Make early assessments of reading, writing and comprehension skills. This will help you to make potentially needed adjustments to the course or instructional strategies.
6. Identify the key concepts, information and skills the course will teach, and distinguish these from peripheral or tangential elements. Ensure that the key concepts, information and skills reflect the objectives for the course as emphasized by your department and/or program.
7. Avoid the "survey surge." Densely packed lectures and lessons often leave students with little to no time for meaningful reflection and class activities.
8. Identify specific outcomes for each lesson and determine which instructional strategies will stimulate the greatest degree of student engagement and be the most effective way to convey the material.
9. Budget adequate time for the lesson, and include time for review, preview and student inquiries.
10. Build into each lesson small but significant assessments of students' comprehension and skills, and use the data to inform further instruction and assignments.

References

• Carlton College. "Designing Effective and Innovative Course."
  http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/
• Diamond, Robert. Designing and Assessing Courses and Curricula: A Practical Guide. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.
• Fink, Dee. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003.
• The National Academy of Academic Leadership. "Designing a College Curriculum. 2007. http://www.thenationalacademy.org/readings/designing.html

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