Backward Course Design
Course alignment is all about ensuring the course content, activities, and assessments align with the course’s learning outcomes, which should align with the program’s stated learning outcomes or competencies. Though students may not be familiar with the term, course alignment is huge for them. Students want their learning experience to all “hang together” so it makes sense why their instructors ask them to complete the assignments that they do. The resources included here give you an overview of how to achieve course alignment using the backward course design method.
- Overview
To help with course alignment, we recommend taking a backward design approach to course design. Backward course design is considered results-driven design, compared to content-focused design. It shifts the course and learning design to focus first on learning goals and the evidence of learning.
In backward design, you start with the end (i.e., the learning outcomes students should achieve in your course), choose how you will know students have met these outcomes (i.e., assessments), and then choose the content, activities, and accompanying technology that will prepare students for those assessments to demonstrate their competence on the learning outcomes. Using backward design helps to ensure that everything maps to the goal—learning outcomes. You of course may have other desired outcomes that are not necessarily about learning, such as building community among students. Consider these too in your overall outcome desires.If you have never “mapped” your course to trace this thread of the outcomes to the rest of the course, here are some tools that can help:
- Instructional Design Table from Quality Matters - This table encourages you to map the course’s learning outcomes with the assessments, materials, activities, and technologies that align with them.
- Course Structure Planning Guide - This guide provides a framework for laying out learning outcomes (where they are introduced and reinforced) throughout the course. It is a more thorough follow-up step after completing the instructional design table.
- Writing Meaningful Learning Outcomes
Learning Outcomes
Learning outcomes are like a pact you make with your students—"Do the work in this course, and you will learn these things." This is why it is so important that the work of the course does indeed align with the outcomes.
It is also important to write meaningful learning outcomes so students understand what it is they are meant to gain in this course. Meaningful student learning outcomes (SLOs)
- Are observable and measurable (or otherwise assessable).
- Suit the level and scope of the course.
- Take into account prerequisites.
- Align with program learning outcomes/competencies.
SLOs are written with active verbs, generally at the critical thinking level (e.g., “understand,” “apply,” “analyze”). Bloom's Revised Taxonomy of action verbs can be used to inform learners about the level of cognitive interaction they are expected to achieve. You can use the Bloom's Taxonomy Verb Wheel for ideas about assessment activities that correlate to the action verb. For a more comprehensive list of action verbs (but minus the corresponding assessment activities), see the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy Handout.
ABCD Method of Writing Learning Outcomes
Action verbs aren’t necessarily the only component of a writing objective. You may find it helpful to follow a formula such as the ABCD method when writing SLOs. The ABCD method of writing learning outcomes addresses 4 areas in their construction:
- Actor who will accomplish the outcome.
- Behavior that will be shown.
- Condition under which students will perform.
- Degree of expected performance.
Outcomes Versus Expectations
It is important to note that there is a difference between outcomes and expectations. Expectations refers to what knowledge you expect students to already possess when they enter your class. Outcomes, on the other hand, are the knowledge and/or skills you expect students to learn in the course.
For example, you may expect that students know APA formatting and anticipate they are applying it in their papers, but your course may not teach it. It’s good practice to minimize how much of a student’s grade is made up of expectations. In other words, you wouldn’t want to have APA formatting count as 20% of a student’s grade on a paper when your course doesn’t teach APA. Also, when incorporating expectations into students’ grades, try to provide resources they can reference just in case what you are expecting is not something all students learned before your course. Using our APA example again, if grading on APA, link to the Library’s APA guide in the assignment instructions to provide students with a resource.
- Assessment Techniques
The assessment technique used to evaluate a student's performance may be a paper, project, presentation, test, or discussion board, to name a few. Generally, assessment techniques are gradable items. There may be multiple ways students demonstrate achievement of a single student learning outcome, or perhaps you will assess students' achievement of one learning outcome through only one assessment technique. It depends on your course design and may be influenced further based on the discipline and your teaching style.
You may also use varied assessment techniques. Which methods are most appropriate for the content in your course and the student skills you need to evaluate?
Pre- and post-testing.
Reflection (journals, discussion forum comments).
Demonstrating skills or other observational data (via work submission or video recording; e.g., Physical Therapy students must record transferring a person from a wheelchair to a hospital bed in the lab).
Peer evaluation.
Self-evaluation.
Authentic assessment (real-world activities) including observational coding.
Problem-based and case-study-based action responses.
Contributions to an e-portfolio (especially useful in areas where evidence of meeting specific standards must be produced).
As you plan the component of course design dedicated to assessment, consider ways that you can provide additional low-stakes assessment opportunities. For example, consider adding a short quiz that identifies the main points in a reading. For lower-level courses, it is also recommended to break larger assignments into multiple graded segments. For example, a major project in the course requires prior submission of a project plan that includes a description of the components and a timeline for completion, an annotated bibliography of the resources to be used, and a peer review of the draft project prior to final submission.
Regardless of the technique(s), your assessments should attempt to capture the construct(s) you seek to assess. This can actually be a lot harder than it may seem, especially when assessing cognitive skills (versus more easily demonstrable skills, such as an occupational therapy exercise).
While papers might be a favorite method of assessment, it is worth reflecting on whether they are always the best assessment method for you. When papers are used for assessment, consider how not just the topic but the paper style might be used to capture a construct. For example, it might make more sense for a nurse to consult resources to write a treatment plan for a patient with diabetes than to write an APA-formatted research paper about diabetes treatment. Each might have its place, of course—it all depends on the learning outcomes of your course.
- Content and Learning Activities
Once you have clearly articulated your learning outcomes and decided how you will evaluate students’ progress toward achieving them, the final step is to plan the instructional strategies and methodologies you will use in teaching the course. "Learning activities" refers to the planned exercises that students will do to prepare for the assessment. Learning activities can be done in- or outside of the classroom. Outside of the classroom, these activities are often readings or homework, but they can also be low-stakes opportunities such as practice tests or group discussions. Your role is to design learning activities that will lead students to success on the assessment (quiz, paper, project, presentation, etc.), which demonstrates their mastery of the aligned learning outcome.
The most important question at this stage is “How can I create a learning experience for students that encourages them to engage with the content, so that they are truly learning, and not simply passing assessments through rote memorization?” Answering this question involves researching and identifying content that will support students' success on the assessments and determining instructional strategies. Of course, you also want content that is timely and relevant, which, depending on your field, might require more regular updates to the course (e.g., instead of updating readings every 3 years, they might need to be updated annually).
Engaging students with this content is another matter. Even when content is relevant, this may not be enough to keep students engaged, especially for drier topics or longer materials. Whether you’re teaching face-to-face, hybrid, or online classes, you have many options beyond the traditional lecture approach for presenting course content to help better engage your students.
- Course Design Process
Course alignment is an important component of course design, but it is not the only consideration in designing a course in Canvas. Once a course map has been completed during the backward design process, the following steps should be addressed.
Course Design Process Steps
1. Plan the course.
The Course Planning Template my be useful to help you plan your course.
Complete a credit audit to prevent overloading the course. You can use this workload time estimator to see how long your planned activities can take.
Build a comprehensive syllabus.
2. Find and organize course content materials, considering
Copyright permissions.
Accessibility. Working with a Librarian to integrate reading lists is a great way to ensure accessibility of course readings.
3. Develop and build the course (growing Canvas skills as needed)
Chunk course topics into modules (we recommend weekly modules) with a clear schedule and expectations.
Write content.
Create assignments, discussions, and quizzes.
Create assessments and rubrics.
Create media elements (e.g., Panopto lectures).
Ensure all course content is accessible.
Build course in Canvas, ensuring to connect content from session to session.
Use the Canvas template to make this process easier and to help ensure the course meets essential quality standards.
4. The final step is reflection, as course design is an interactive, evolving process, not a static one-time endeavor.
As student demographics evolve, disciplines update and technology use changes, so should your courses. This includes incorporating student feedback and engaging in self-review, peer review, and/or instructional design review. The Essential Quality Standards & Recommended Practices Course Checklist can help with this review.
For a deeper dive into course design methods and best practices, please consider enrolling in the Online Course Design Essentials Workshop, which was designed and developed by the St. Kate's Academic Technology team.