Abstract
This chapter details how learning-based course design promotes meaningful student connections with course content, course goals, and connections with peers, faculty, and student self-awareness. No matter the modality, the learning-based course design model provides a pathway for faculty and instructional designers to use backward design to create courses that embrace significant learning, valuable practice, and feedback opportunities. With an emphasis on authentic activities that are aligned to learning outcomes, learning-based course design avoids busywork and reduces rote memorization of facts and figures. Educational technologies can strengthen the faculty and student course experience, provided that these are purposefully integrated into the course. Courses designed with close attention to student learning provide skill growth that strengthens students' professional lives. Course feedback data allows faculty to refine the course and programs and institutions to develop stronger alignment to their stated goals.
TopIntroduction
Institutions, faculty, and students want courses to offer valuable learning experiences. However, what does this lofty goal look like in practice and how can institutions and faculty move in this direction? If learning is the acquisition of values, knowledge, or skills that students are able to apply in new contexts what factors contribute to a course providing a valuable learning experience? The value of a course comes from skills students gain as a result of the course and the potential application of these skills in students’ professional lives, the continuous improvement of the course based on data from the course, and the alignment of the course with programmatic and institutional goals. From this perspective, the course does not simply deliver learning to the students, but is a site of learning for students, faculty, and the institution. Conceptualizing the course in this manner heightens the importance of course design. In turn, the course must be located in a system that allows programs and institutions to refine their practices based on data from the course.
The foundational learning-based course design model the authors explored in this chapter blends the three stages of backward design (Isecke, 2011/2013; Wiggins & McTighe. 2021), Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning (Fink, 2013), revised Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), and wise feedback (Yeager et al., 2014) as a model for designing and delivering a robust and engaging course. Learning-based course design promotes course outcomes alignment as a pathway to meaningful student connections with course content and skill development, valuable practice as a strategy for mastering the skills identified in the course outcomes, and feedback as actionable data about learning progress for the students, the faculty, the program, and the institution. The importance of feedback as each actor seeks to meet their defined outcomes, the focus on course-level design processes, and the corresponding implications for action at each level distinguish the learning-based course design model from a model focused on content delivery by faculty.
Learning-based course design requires faculty who are critically engaged with the following design processes at the course level:
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Designing for significance and application beyond the course.
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Replacing busywork with authentic practice opportunities.
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Offering frequent and multidimensional feedback.
This chapter offers a process-based view of the three phases of learning-based course design at the course level, as illustrated in Figure 1:
Phase 1: Ensuring a course consists of significant learning opportunities for students via the construction of course outcomes that will guide all other design choices. The goal of significant learning is to weave course learning into lifelong learning (Fink, 2013, p. 7-8). Thus, courses should be designed in a learner-centered delivery that promotes active learning, student engagement, and reflection so that skills practiced in the course become part of the student’s approach to the larger world.
Phase 2: Crafting course activities that meaningfully advance student mastery of the course learning outcomes via valuable practice. Valuable practice is defined as course activities whose authentic dimension and future professional connection have been ensured via the alignment of these activities with significant course learning outcomes. In turn, these course activities will produce a collection of student, course, and faculty learning artifacts to meet course, program, college, and institutional assessment needs.
Phase 3: Designing feedback that is frequent and robust flows both ways between the instructor and the students and is used by programs and university administration in their respective efforts to deliver learning that reflects stated outcomes. Feedback is defined as information about how the present state (of learning and performance) relates to defined outcomes (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006, p. 200). Learning-based course design requires attention to stated course outcomes and adjustment on the part of students, faculty, and administration as needed.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Learning Management System (LMS): A technology solution that houses courses, content, student work, assessments, and grades. This is a portal for student engagement and for the submission and evaluation of student work.
Learning-Based Course Design: An approach to course design that blends the three stages of backward design (Isecke, 2011 AU12: The in-text citation "Isecke, 2011" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. /2013; Wiggins & McTighe, 2012 , 2021 ), Fink’s (2013) taxonomy of significant learning, Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy ( Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001 ), and wise feedback ( Yeager et al., 2014 ) as a model for delivering a robust and engaging course that allows students to work toward the mastery of course outcomes. Learning-based course design is a model of continuous course improvement in which the faculty gathers feedback to refine the course, and academic units above the course use course feedback to improve the mastery of their designated learning outcomes.
Backward Design: A scaffolding process that starts with the goals and outcomes of a course to design learning experiences and instructional techniques.
Student Growth Goals: What will the student be able to know, value, and do.
Aligned Outcomes: The condition in which course, program, and institution outcomes all describe the same student skill, usually with increasing generality as one progresses upward from course to program and to institution. When course activities are mapped to aligned course outcomes, student learning reflects institutional priorities.
Feedback: A process in which information provides opportunity for adjustment. Feedback is a key part of the learning process for students as they master course outcomes and for faculty as they seek to improve their course design.
Significant Learning: Designing learning activities in which students deeply connect with course outcomes to produce transformative and lifelong learning and application of content.
Valuable Practice: This describes both an approach to the design of course activities and features of a specific activity that promote student learning. Valuable practice represents activities that meet all of the following conditions: Activities have been aligned with course outcomes designed for significant learning, activities provide authentic application opportunities, and activities use active learning strategies to encourage students to engage deeply with course content, either individually or collaboratively.
Course Outcomes: A written statement that uses a single measurable verb to describe student skill growth or learning produced as a result of aligned activities and assessments.