Designing Your Course

Online Course Design Best Practices

The online courses design best practices page looks at how to overcome obstacles to teaching online, addresses feedback from students about courses converted to an online modality, and provides faculty with resources for creating online courses.

Learning Outcomes

Instructors create learning outcomes to define what they want students to learn: the big questions, concepts, skills, and content areas. Clarifying and updating your learning outcomes will help you as you plan for the upcoming semester, when some students will be online for part or all of the time, and make ongoing adjustments as conditions change. The learning outcomes page looks at how these changes might affect your course outcomes and how to clearly articulate the new learning outcomes.

Backward Design

The backward design page describes how to map out your course by working backward—starting with what students need to learn, proceeding through assessments, and ending with learning activities.

Assessment

Find a comprehensive guide to assessing student learning on the assessment page or jump straight to guidance on specific assessment categories such as test and quizzes, homework assignments and projects.