course design techniques for general education learning ... practices documents...1) review the...

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Laura Lohman, Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence, Queens University of Charlotte https://my.queens.edu/cafe/SitePages/Home.aspx

Course Design Techniques for General Education Learning Community Courses

This packet is designed to help you and other faculty teaching in learning communities think through key questions when preparing for and teaching your next learning community. Use this packet in conjunction with the resources shared through the General Education my.queens.edu site.

This packet draws on over thirteen years of experience applying key principles of instructional design to university courses and workplace learning for adults. To support Queens curriculum, it synthesizes strong elements of two key texts: Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences and Dick and Carey’s The Systematic Design of Instruction. Key techniques and principles covered in this packet are applicable to courses in all modalities. For more information about course design, see CAFÉ’s Course Design webpage.

Overview of Backwards Course Design Compare the sequence of steps in two contrasting approaches to creating a course:

Typical Approach Backwards Design

1. Choose textbook/readings 1. Analyze your learners and the context in which learning will occur

2. Divide text(s) up among the course weeks

2. What do you want learners to be able to do at the end of the course?

3. Make/update the syllabus 3. How will you know that they can do it? What is an accurate “test”?

4. Make each class session 1 by 1 4. What skills do they need to gain to do it?

5. Make each exam 1 by 1 5. What activities will help them build those skills?

6. Curve/assign extra credit when results are not what you hoped

6. What is the appropriate order of building those skills?

7. Repeat 7. What resources are needed to help them build those skills?

This packet guides you to make critical observations and decisions following the backwards design process. These icons signal key activities:

Point in the process to write down observations and ideas

Point in the process to collaborate with other faculty in your learning community

Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence

https://my.queens.edu/gened/SitePages/Home.aspx

https://my.queens.edu/cafe/SitePages/Course%20Design.aspx

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Step 1 Analyze your learners and the context in which learning will occur.

Use this worksheet to capture key information about your learners and the situation in which they will be learning. Be honest and realistic! Your course design will be better the more it can be grounded in reality.

Answer concisely to the best of your ability and ask a colleague to help fill in gaps.

Course • Course level: 100, 200, 300 • Number of credit hours • Is subject convergent (questions have 1 right

answer) or divergent (>1 right answers)?

• Is knowledge in your field relatively stable or do things change a lot?

• *Where does this course fall in a sequence in relation to other courses?

Learners • Age • Gender and ethnicity • Other responsibilities and activities • Life and/or professional goals related to

this learning experience • Reasons for enrolling in this course

• Prior experiences, knowledge, skills, attitudes towards the subject

• Attitudes towards course modality • Motivation • Learning preferences • General ability levels

Instructional Context • Number of students • Modality (face-to-face, online, hybrid) • Space (technology, furniture, noise,

lighting)

• Time of day of class meeting or other instructional activity (and who controls it)

• Duration of synchronous class sessions • Frequency of synchronous class sessions

External expectations

• Societal expectations • Accreditation expectations • *Relevant university/college/dept/program curricular goals that you cannot change

Real-life performance context

• *Applicability of learning to students’ individual lives • *Applicability of learning to students’ social relationships • *Applicability of learning to students’ civic participation • *Applicability of learning to students’ role in workplace

Summary Question

Compare the duration of your experience and education with your learners. How much more practice have you had in building and using skills essential to the course?

https://my.queens.edu/gened/Faculty%20documents/Rubrics%20and%20Scaffolded%20Outcomes/Scaffolded%20GE%20Programmatic%20Outcomes.pdf



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Step 2 What do you want learners to be able to do at the end of the course? Significant Learning and the General Education Student Learning Outcomes Dee Fink’s taxonomy below focuses on “significant learning,” or learning that brings about lasting change in learners’ lives. It is often what they might say they remember from your course 3 to 5 years after taking it. When we focus on content, much of that is not retained later, but processes of thought or ways of working through problems will often stick and have a lasting effect. Fink contends that this kind of lasting, significant learning is fostered when we incorporate learning from several of the 6 areas of the taxonomy.

Dee Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning

This is an important moment to do 2 things:

1) Review the General Education Student Learning Outcomes, as worded for the level of your learning community course (100-, 200-, or 300-level). As you do, you’ll see how they relate various parts of Fink’s taxonomy.

2) Review the realities that you noted in Step 1 about your learners and the context in which learning will occur. You may need to adjust how you are envisioning your course and what students will realistically be able to do at the end of it.


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Your ability to effectively address the General Education Student Learning Outcomes (GenEd SLOs) and your learners’ motivations will likely depend on how you situate your discipline as either:

a. a focal point, or b. a source of examples helping students gain practice in the GenEd SLOs:

Which of these two approaches may be more effective will depend on several factors; your observations in Step 1 will be critical in determining the better approach.

Your discipline

GenEd SLO 1

GenEd SLO 2

GenEd SLO 3

GenEd SLO 4

GenEd SLO 5

GenEd SLOs 1-5

Examples from your discipline





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Collaboration in Clarifying End-of-Semester Outcomes Work with the other faculty in the learning community to clarify how the other courses inform and support what you want the learners to be able to do at the end of your course.

Communicating How Courses Interrelate in Supporting End-of-Semester Outcomes As you clarify this, identify how you can communicate this to students. For example, you could pose the question that links all the courses, or you could diagram how the courses relate to each other.

Then identify at least 2 ways that you can foreground this in your syllabi and in MyCourses. One location is the Course Summary block in MyCourses, where you can reiterate how your course feeds into the entire learning community:

Course 1

Course 3Course 2

Course 1

Course 2

Course 3

What is here?

What is here?

What is here?

What is here?

What is here?

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Step 3 How will you know that they can do it? What is an accurate “test”? This is your “test” showing whether or not your students achieved the significant learning outcomes that you, in collaboration with other learning community faculty, identified as the focus of learners’ experiences. The “test” will probably be a significant assessment of some sort in the final weeks of the semester. Rather than an actual exam, could be a presentation, performance, written document, multimedia communication, model, etc.

How Your Major “Test” Relates to General Education Student Learning Outcomes Be sure to review the specific wording of the General Education Student Learning Outcomes when envisioning what your major assessment(s) might be.

At this stage, a diagram might help you visualize how several of the General Education Student Learning Outcomes can be assessed in a major “test.” In this case a multimedia presentation (live or recorded) could be used to assess whether the student(s) had achieved the General Education Student Learning Outcomes 1, 2, and 3 in a 200-level learning community course.

The details of your course and learning community would impact exactly how the other 2 General Education Student Learning Outcomes 4 and 5 might be addressed in the same major “test” or in another major “test.”

Sketching a diagram in the vein of the one above may help you conceptualize this along with other faculty in the learning community.

Ultimately, any major “test” or assessment would be preceded by practice activities with feedback, which you will plan later in Step 5, after you have identified the skills that your students need to have gained in order to be able to complete your major assessment(s) successfully.




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Realistic Framing From several design and learning perspectives, the more this “test” is situated in a real or realistic frame, the better. An example would be presenting students with a specific problem from the current real world beyond the classroom, having them give a presentation to members of an industry or community about how they propose solving the problem, or having them create a presentation intended for, but not actually delivered to, that audience.

Here are two prompts that are explicitly framed towards a public audience:

QEN Integrated Assignment—Message Proposal Spring 2016

AUDIENCE: The Queens and Charlotte community. Remember that your PSA will be a distillation of this paper and will be broadcast publically, so your audience is quite broad.

PURPOSE: To create a clear argument supported by research that will convince your audience to do or think something; you’ll need to persuade the audience that a problem exists, that your perspective is valid, with a message that will invite meaningful, critical conversation.

Case Study Assignment—Contracting with Upward Bound

Background: In Gambil and Kirk’s case study, we learned about the problems facing the Upward Bound Baltimore Center (UBBC). You and your group members are Michelle, the Director of Human Resources in the East Cost Upward Bound System’s central office. Yesterday, the President of Upward Bound said to Michelle, “Go to Baltimore and figure out what’s going on. I know you’ve got good rapport with both Jim and Kenny and I’d like you to help them get things on track.” First, work as a team to complete the accompanying worksheet. Then prepare a presentation of no more than 6 slides for the President in which you share your findings and recommendations.

Integrative Assignments Your answer to the basic question posed at the outset of Step 3—How will you know that they have achieved the learning outcomes? What is an accurate “test”?—will shape the integrative assignment(s). Please review the General Education learning community resources for more details regarding expectations for integrative assignment(s).

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Step 4 What skills do they need to gain to do it? What skills do they need to have developed to succeed on your major “test”? One good way to answer this question is to first talk through and write down the steps involved in doing the “test”

that you wrote down when you worked on the previous section. Then for each step, write down each skill that is needed to carry out that step effectively.

Look out for skills that you may take for granted in steps you can do somewhat on “autopilot” (remember how you noted in Step 1 that your body of experience is different than your students’). Students will often not yet have those skills, so they will need instruction, practice, and feedback to develop them. Then students will

also need instruction, practice, and feedback on using those skills together. By identifying the component skills that students lack or struggle with, you can better gauge how much instructional time and practice time to build into your class schedule and assignments.

Many of the component skills will relate to the 5 General Education Student Learning Outcomes.

Other skills may depend on the type of “test” you identified in Step 3. For example, if you are using a group project as a “test” of whether or not students met the General Education Student Learning Outcomes, then their success will depend on their building and using skills related to teamwork. Before proceeding to Step 5, make sure that you have incorporated several such component skills in your sketching for Step 4. Doing so is an essential prompt to remind you to provide sufficient instruction, practice and feedback in Steps 5-7 so they can succeed on this group “test.”


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Step 5 What activities will help them build those skills? Plan to include two kinds of activities:

1) Skill practice activities with feedback but no/minimal impact on their grade, and 2) Skill practice activities with feedback that do impact their grade.

Effective practice activities may include individual practice, group practice, and/or metacognitive activities.

Your “test” of students’ achieving the GenEd SLOs (Step 3 above)

GenEd SLO (please review SLO wording at 100-, 200-, or 300- level)

Practice activities with feedback but no/minimal direct impact on grade

Practice activities with feedback and an impact on grade

1. Evaluate information and approaches to complex problems

Example: solve sample problem in small groups through RingCentral videoconferencing breakout rooms, followed by whole class debrief

2. Integrate learning from multiple contexts

3. Demonstrate communication fluency using multiple modes of communication

Example: In-class short writing activities

4. Reflect critically on the relationship between global and local contexts

5. Evaluate the consequences personal choices have on the well-being of communities




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Depending on how you diagrammed the skills in Step 4 and what kinds of significant learning you elected to include in Step 2, consider including in an extra row on the previous page

• Metacognitive skill-building activities (helpful metacognitive prompts here) • Teamwork skill-building activities

Step 6 What is the appropriate order of building those skills? This will vary by course, but if you are using the diagram you made in Step 4, a common approach is to sequence skill-building by moving from the bottom to the top, and from the left to the right. You can draw a horizontal line above skills that are developed prior to the course. For example, I would draw a line above “Write in English” and not include that skill when addressing Step 6. Depending on the course I am teaching and the characteristics of the learners, I might draw the line at a higher level.

This is an important topic for discussion and collaboration with other faculty in your learning community to make sure that students have had sufficient instruction, practice, and feedback on component skills from one or more courses before they are asked to begin combining multiple skills from multiple courses.

To begin generating some ideas for discussion, you can sketch out possible sequencing in your course in the space below.

Then as you work with other faculty in your learning community, you can use the table on the next page to map a logical sequencing onto a semester schedule, taking into account practice activities in the other learning community courses as needed. Note that the table guides you to identify an effective timing of skill-

building practice activities—along with the return of feedback—in relation to your major assessment(s) or “test(s).”

https://www.lifescied.org/doi/full/10.1187/cbe.12-03-0033

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Week Major “test(s)” in my course

Skills built in my course as needed for that “test”

Practice activities in my course for those skills

My feedback on that practice returned to students

Relevant practice and feedback from other QLC(s)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

F

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Step 7 What resources are needed to help them build those skills? Take a moment to review what you noted about your learners’ backgrounds above in Step 1. Then use that as a guide when choosing instructional resources. Recall, for example, that students’ reading time and ability may vary from yours and from one another.

Consider providing instructional resources of varied lengths and in various media:

When evaluating and selecting instructional materials, consult the first page of the quick guide Providing Accessible Materials to determine how accessible the materials are (e.g., videos with captions). You may want to identify alternatives that could be a better choice or ways that you may need to deliver or modify materials.

This is a valuable opportunity to check with other faculty teaching in the learning community to determine if there an instructional resource that more than one course in your learning community can use.

This can help reinforce for students the ways in which the courses in the learning community relate to each other. It may also allow you to model key skills for your

students, such as those used in evaluating or integrating information, or in carrying out successful teamwork.

Textbook Texts Text excerpts

Models Videos Audio recordings

Presentations Job aids

https://my.queens.edu/cafe/Best%20Practices%20Documents/Providing%20Accessible%20Materials.pdf

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Plan Ongoing Collaboration with Faculty in the Learning Community You can maintain your collaboration with other faculty in the learning community in a variety of ways. Be sure to discuss and identify which tools and methods make the most sense and will help you address your different schedules effectively.

Also identify key points before and during the semester that you need to work together, based on the sequencing and timing that you have worked out in Step 6. Set some dates in advance and commit to them.

Below are some examples of different options that you have for engaging in synchronous (same-time) collaboration and asynchronous collaboration. These examples may help you explore new possibilities and determine what tools will work best for your learning community.

Some of these tools may also help your students if you are using group assessments.

Synchronous Asynchronous

In-person face-to-face meetings Flipgrid (video-based discussion board)

RingCentral video meetings (includes screensharing)

Stormboard

You can enhance RingCentral video meetings with synchronous collaborative editing of documents in OneDrive (e.g., .docx, .pptx, OneNote)

Shared documents in OneDrive (e.g., .docx, .pptx, OneNote)

Planner in Office 365 (available from onedrive.queens.edu or mail.queens.edu, integrates with Outlook)

Syllabus – Friendly Reminders • You can save time and be sure that your syllabus addresses university policies by starting with

CAFÉ’s accessible syllabus template. It has been created with heading Styles, so you just replace the existing text with your text and the Style remains.

• Make sure that you have incorporated a verbal and/or visual representation of how your course relates to others in the learning community based on what you worked out with the other faculty in your learning community in Step 2.

• Consider including a visual representation of how major assessments relate to the learning outcomes in your course (example below). Tools for this include SmartArt in Word or LucidChart.

• Make sure that you have given the same weight to the integrative assignment(s) in your grading scheme as it is given in the other courses in the learning community.

• Take a moment to see how you can support the accessibility of your syllabus as you use these forms of visual communication. In particular, review the section on Alt-text as you add images.

https://my.queens.edu/cafe/Best%20Practices%20Documents/Quick%20Guide%20to%20Using%20Flipgrid.pdf

https://stormboard.com/storm/49999/Play_Storm

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/collaborate-in-onedrive-for-business-586df57b-fdae-439c-ae5b-71cbe5bb0d4c



https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RE3eKmj?pid=ocpVideo0-innerdiv-oneplayer&postJsllMsg=true&maskLevel=20&market=en-us

https://my.queens.edu/cafe/Best%20Practices%20Documents/Syllabus%20template%20(accessible).docx

https://my.queens.edu/cafe/Best%20Practices%20Documents/Providing%20Accessible%20Materials.pdf

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Check-Ins and Observations throughout the Semester Communicating General Education Student Learning Outcomes

1. How are you communicating to students your course’s connection to the General Education Student Learning Outcomes? Syllabus Verbiage in assignment instructions Rubrics Talk about it in class during first week Talk about it in class in later weeks Language in MyCourses Other ____________________

2. How do you communicate to students how the General Education Student Learning Outcomes are addressed in the assessment of student work? Outcomes are included in rubric given to students before they do and submit work Outcomes are included rubric given to students after work is submitted Whole class debrief of trends in work submitted in relation to the outcomes Formative feedback relating to the outcomes Other ____________________

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Supporting Students in Completing the Integrative Assignment(s)

1. How can you clarify your expectations around key skills needed to complete the integrative assignment(s)? Provide more clear instructions Discuss the expectations earlier Provide models of good and weak work/performance Involve students in using a rubric to evaluate models or drafts Other ____________________

2. What are some ways you can help students build those skills that you have not yet tried?

Provide more curated resources Discuss with students effective strategies for building the skill Incorporate metacognitive prompts related to the skill Reallocate class time towards this skill Explicitly break down the task into building block or component skills (Step 4) Incorporate additional opportunities for students to practice building block or component

skills and receive formative feedback

3. Is there an opportunity to pool resources with other instructors in your learning community or across learning communities to help students build a key skill that they may be struggling with?