course design

Shaping a Course: Three Considerations

Course planning for the coming academic year is either underway or about to start. It offers a chance to look at how learning experiences—exams, assignments, and activities—are sequenced in a course and what they add up to collectively. Assembling learning experiences so that they effectively

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One Rock at a Time: Facing Fall Course Planning

Summer is a great time to sit outside. I remember when we were building a new patio. The contractors delivered a huge pile of rocks to our front yard. Big stones. Midsize stones. Some multihued and no larger than hefty pebbles. The patio was going

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Finding Course Design Flaws

In the rural part of North Central Pennsylvania where I live, a lot of families have owned the same farmland for generations. Houses are handed down, with each new family adjusting the home to their needs—adding a porch here, a back bedroom there, an attachment

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Putting Bloom in Its Place

Higher education tends to bow down to Bloom as the oracle of educational objectives. Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, which ranks types of learning on six levels from “lowest” (remembering) to “highest” (creating), is a standard guide that almost all academic committees use in reviewing course proposals.

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Student Feedback: Should It Change Course Structure?

When it comes to making decisions about what happens in courses, students don’t have much say. Teachers decide what students learn, how they’ll learn it, when they’ll learn it, and finally, whether they have learned it. Expertise and professional responsibilities give teacher power over what

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Teacher helping a student with a project

What Does It Mean to Design a Course?

It’s a great question and not one most of us ask ourselves as often as we should. Is creating or reconstituting a course a design process, or is it more like course assembly? Even though instructional designers are more visibly present than they used to

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students need to learn is how to sort, integrate, analyze, and assess content

Too Much Content

Long careers provide opportunities to look back, and I found myself doing a bit of that of late. It’s not so much to reflect on what I’ve learned as what I still don’t know. What still puzzles me about teaching and learning? What remains unanswered,

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An Online Course Maintenance Program that Works

An Online Course Maintenance Program that Works

One of the challenges that an online program faces is how to keep courses up-to-date. Links break, articles become outdated, new material appears, and so on. In essence, an online course starts deteriorating as soon as it is built. New programs are often unprepared for

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assignment template promotes clarity

A Template for Assignment Development and Clarity

For our next installment in this series on assignments, we’d like to share an assignment template that we think can be helpful to teachers and students. Let’s start with how it can help teachers. It’s no surprise that we think many teachers could do a

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