Revisiting Alignment in Course Design
Designing learner experiences, especially when those learners do not have the benefit of immediate and continuous synchronous feedback opportunities, requires us to revisit:
i) the purpose of the course or program of study,
ii) the activities that allow learners to identify and apply concepts, and
iii) options available to us to assess the degree to which outcomes have been achieved.Consider the image 4.1 at the top. If we consider the misalignment of those circles as a misalignment of the learner experience, what might the learner feel, accomplish (or not), and perform (or not) in each of the two scenarios?
The goal when designing for impact is to structure a course that is “a creative mix that investigates established knowledge while engaging in a process of establishing knowledge… a structure that is simultaneously constraining and enabling – imposing rules that delimit possibilities and that allow choice at the same time” (Davis et al., 2008, p. 194). These constraints are necessary to guide a learner from what they already know toward higher domain specific knowledge in as efficient and engaging a manner as possible.
Teaching, then, should not be about telling, but about organizing experiences that “orient learners’ perceptions to particular details and prompt them to associate those details to other details” (Davis et al., 2008, p. 168). A learning experience must be just that; experienced. We must design our course with learning, not teaching, as our central focus.
In Chapter 3, we’ve discussed how to write learning outcome statements and adopt an outcome-centred approach to decide the course structure. In this chapter, we will provide an overview of how to plan course instruction in blended/online spaces that are highly and positively impactful for student learning. We will discuss
- Planing teaching and learning activities to promote active learning
- Designing assessment tasks
- Integrating the in-class and online learning in blended learning environment
- Mapping learning activities and assessment with technical tools
Teaching and Learning Activities in Blended/Online Spaces
The outcome-centred approach to course structure (introduced in Chapter 3) indicates a thematic course structure in which each course theme/unit is composed of tasks (and even subtasks) specifying the outcomes (behaviours) students will be expected to achieve and corresponding course content that students will need to utilize to accomplish the required tasks . As such, in planning your teaching and learning activities, it is helpful to consider each instructional unit or module as a learning object. A learning object is a self-contained and complete instructional package that combines content, practices, and assessments that is sufficient to enable students to achieve at least a single learning outcome. In an online environment, a learning object would be a chunk of electronic content, which is what we usually call the individu