Course Design

Getting Your Courses Ready for Fall

Whether you're starting a course from scratch or revamping something you've taught many times before, careful planning is key to successful teaching. CRLT offers many resources to support U-M instructors in their course planning as the beginning of the semester draws near.

  • The resources on this Course Design and Planning page focus on course design. Do you tend to begin your course planning by asking, "What material do I want to cover?" or "What do I want my students to learn?" Research shows that instructors best promote student learning when they start with the second question, organizing course content, class activities, and assignments around a clear set of learning objectives. The Course Design and Planning resources explain this research and walk you through the process of applying it to your courses.
  • The resources on this Strategies for Effective Lesson Design page focus on preparing individual class meetings. This page outlines steps for developing learning objectives, structuring relevant learning activities, and checking student understanding along the way.  
  • CRLT Consultations are available for U-M instructors at any point in the course planning process, whether you want to explore new approaches to teaching the subject matter, brainstorm about integrating technology into a course, or apply principles of course design.   

Even small changes can produce big impacts on student engagement and learning. And whether it's enhancing a key assignment, tweaking a class activity, or introducing active learning into one lecture session, a well-planned shift can also fuel your own excitement about the new semester.

Submitted by tbraun on Thu, 08/15/2013 - 4:35pm
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Good Reads: Designing Your Courses around Student Learning Goals

Planning your winter term courses over the break?  Hoping your students will turn in stronger final essays and exams than the ones you just finished grading?  Much research on learning and teaching suggests you can start getting them on the right path now, by designing your syllabus around student learning goals.  Here are a couple of online resources about applying the principles of "Backward Design" to the planning of college courses.

  • In this ProfHacker blog post from The Chronicle of Higher Education, literature professor Mark Sample offers a short, simple introduction to Backward Design, discussing his shift from asking the conventional question "what should my students read this term?" to considering instead, "what do I want them to learn?"
  • Vanderbilt University's Center for Teaching provides this overview of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's influential book Understanding by Design and provides links to resources that assist instructors in applying the book's principles in their course planning.  (The full book is available electronically through the U-M library system to authenticated users.)

CRLT also offers a range of resources to help you build your syllabus on our Course Design and Planning page. 

Submitted by tbraun on Fri, 12/21/2012 - 9:44am
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Strategies for Effective Lesson Planning

Stiliana Milkova
Center for Research on Learning and Teaching

A lesson plan is the instructor’s road map of what students need to learn and how it will be done effectively during the class time. Before you plan your lesson, you will first need to identify the learning objectives for the class meeting.  Then, you can design appropriate learning activities and develop strategies to obtain feedback on student learning. A successful lesson plan addresses and integrates these three key components:

  • Objectives for student learning
  • Teaching/learning activities
  • Strategies to check student understanding

Specifying concrete objectives for student learning will help you determine the kinds of teaching and learning activities you will use in class, while those activities will define how you will check whether the learning objectives have been accomplished (see Fig. 1).

LessonPlan

Steps for Preparing a Lesson Plan

Below are six steps to guide you when you create your first lesson plans. Each step is accompanied by a set of questions meant to prompt reflection and aid you in designing your teaching and learning activities. Read more »

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Course Design and Planning

 

A successful course depends on the planning that precedes it. The articles and links in this section serve as planning guides for both faculty and GSIs. They provide instructions for developing a new or existing course and for creating a syllabus.

Course Design Tutorial 
This site provides a step-by-step approach to course planning starting with the development of goals for student learning and  moving on to teaching strategies, assessment of student learning, and the syllabus. Many of the examples are drawn from the geosciences, but the principles are relevant to all disciplines.

Backward Design (Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching)
An overview of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's influential book Understanding by Design and links to resources that assist instructors in applying the book's principles in their course planning.  (The full book is available electronically through the U-M library system to authenticated users.) Read more »

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