Plan Your Layout

I am going to suggest one way that worked for me to plan a course layout. In the discussion that follows I hope we'll see examples of other methods.

As I mentioned earlier, my initial reaction to the idea of weekly objectives and deliverables was to throw a tantrum. However, once I calmed down and got my thoughts organized in a spreadsheet (this is how my brain works - not for everybody!), I realized that I was able to see very clearly how to support my students with the minimum of course readings and assignments - everything extraneous was cut. This meant that I could confidently tell students exactly why they had to do everything assigned in the course. With students pulled in so many different directions by school, work, family, and other obligations, it's only respectful of their time to eliminate busywork. 

Why was I able to trim my course? Because of the backwards design approach. I already knew what my culminating assignment would be, in which my students would have the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the course objectives. Everything else in the course therefore had to support students in being able to succeed in their final project. The design followed from there. 

My example, again, is BA301, a business research course. This course was taught fully online so I took a weekly approach. If your course meets in person, you'll plan accordingly. I'm going to be specific with my example here but feel free to take a step back and generalize to apply this to your context.

The final project for the course was a research paper. Since my primary way of demonstrating that students have mastered the learning objectives for the course is this paper, then I had to provide tons of built-in opportunities to tackle the writing in small chunks, get feedback, and revise so that their final draft can be an A paper. I built in two rounds of feedback for the paper, from peers and from me. Working backwards: the assignment was due finals week, so week 10 had to be spent on revision. Therefore week 9 was when I would review drafts. Week 8 would be spent on revision to bring drafts to a level where my feedback would be useful, so week 7 was when they'd be doing peer reviews of first drafts. So they had to hand in their first draft (to a classmate) during week 6. Therefore, I had to front-load the first half of the course with content so that students would have the background skills needed to identify a problem for their company through doing specialized research in business databases and write their first draft.

What a sample layout looks like

The goal here is to design your course layout with weekly objectives, readings (or other content), and deliverables - in order to support students to attain the overall course objectives. To do this: 

• Every weekly objective supports students in meeting the course objectives.
• Every weekly objective is scaffolded with course materials and assessed with a deliverable of some kind.
• If weekly objectives don’t have a deliverable, if content or activities don’t support a weekly objective, or if a weekly objective doesn’t support a course objective, CUT!

Here is an example of what the column headers in your spreadsheet might look like: 

Here is an example of a filled-in spreadsheet using this structure: Learning Objectives Spreadsheet Links to an external site..

At the top I listed the course learning objectives that the department required. Underneath that I wrote my own learning objectives that are measurable and specific (getting at the same concepts as the required objectives, but worded so that they are assessable). 

Below that the course layout fun begins. I covered 1-3 topics per week; each topic gets its own row. The narrative overview for each topic is the introductory text that I put at the top of the week's content page in the online course. Each topic has its own weekly objective, and each weekly objective supports at least one of the course objectives. 

I decided to think of scaffolding and deliverables as two different kinds of activities since they both take students' time. Scaffolding asks students to read, watch, or otherwise interact with content that helps them meet the weekly objective. Deliverables are opportunities for students to practice the skills and knowledge they'll need in order to do well on the final assessment. A deliverable can be as simple as an auto-graded 5-question multiple choice quiz, or as complex an assignment as you choose to write. Everything associated with a grade had a rubric so that students could see what I hoped they'd demonstrate.

Wiggins and McTighe call this approach Backward Design. They were reacting to course design that begins with the textbook. As you can see, with this approach you can't decide on your course content until you've written your course objectives, designed an assessment, and figured out a course layout that supports students in succeeding on that assessment.