Preparing to Teach
6 Course Planning
Rhiannon Pollard
University of Florida School of Forest Resources & Conservation
Course Design Basics
Instructional design theories abound! Here are a few tried-and-true standards that will help you orient yourself to the process of creating a course.
Backward Design
Backward design refers to the process of determining what you want your students to be able to do at the end of the course before you design your content and plan your delivery.
In other words:
- What are they supposed to learn?
- How will you know they learned it?
- How will you help them learn it?
The question of “what will you teach?” is not the point of the process, because the focus of the course is on what and how the students are learning to do – not what you are teaching. Backward design makes designing your courses easier, in fact, because the outcomes will already be there to inform your decisions on both content and delivery methods.
ADDIE (Analyze, Design Develop, Implement, Evaluate)
“ADDIE” is one of the most commonly used instructional design theories which is in-depth and in which each step provides an outcome that informs the next step. ADDIE provides an ongoing opportunity to assess and revise your teaching across course offerings.
Always start with your course’s student learning objectives. Then, drill down and develop objectives for each module or topic. When it’s time to decide how you will help your students learn the material, you can refer to the Learning Activities or Resources sections.
Writing Good Objectives
A learning objective is much more specific than a goal. According to Mager (1962), the ideal learning objective has 3 parts:
- A measurable verb (behavior)
- The important condition (if any) under which the performance is to occur and
- The criterion of acceptable performance.
If the conditions are obvious, they may or may not be stated. However, sometimes the adding the condition(s) and/or the criterion adds clarity to a learning objective.
What Not to Do…
“Students will understand the hydrologic cycle.”
⇒ This fails to address how students will demonstrate learning. It is neither specific nor measurable in terms of the outcome.
Better…
“After completing this lesson, the student will be able to evaluate a natural resource policy in terms of its impact on water quality.”
“Given a set of statistical data, the student will be able to predict the effects of variables x, y, z relative to fish populations in the Gulf of Mexico.”
⇒ Students know what they will be able to do, and you have a clear next step for creating your assessment of this objective.
Always keep in mind that the objectives, and what the students are able to do, will need to be directly assessed – so if you say a student “learned” something, how are you going to assess that?
If the objective is, for example, that the student can analyze a water quality sample, you can assess that by having them describe the steps required to do so.
Using Bloom’s Taxonomy