how to design a class course

by Lula Stark PhD 9 min read

Seven steps to designing a class

  1. Devise and sequence learning objectives. The fundamental goal of any course is to help students learn something.
  2. Ideate instruction, practice, and feedback for objectives. Once you have a list of learning objectives, the next task...
  3. Iteratively sketch, evaluate and refine a syllabus. As I generate ideas for how to teach each of...

Design Your Course
  1. Consider timing and logistics.
  2. Recognize who your students are.
  3. Identify the situational constraints.
  4. Articulate your learning objectives.
  5. Identify potential assessments.
  6. Identify appropriate instructional strategies.
  7. Plan your course content and schedule.

Full Answer

How to learn the basics of design?

Design Your Course. To design an effective course, you need to: Consider timing and logistics; Recognize who your students are; Identify the situational constraints; Articulate your learning objectives; Identify potential assessments; Identify appropriate instructional strategies; Plan your course content and schedule; Write a Syllabus

How do I structure my course?

are three ways to design classes: by composition, via inheritance, and via interface. Composition(or aggregation) is achieved by using For example, the ArrayStack class includes an array of objects. Inheritanceallows you to define a new class in terms of an old class. The new class automatically inherits all public members of the

How to start instructional design?

May 17, 2019 · Write an effective course description that provides a basic overview of the course material that will be covered in one semester. Submit your proposal to the appropriate faculty members. Write a list of course objectives and outcomes that students should be able to meet by taking the course.

How do I set details for a course?

How To Create Classes With CSS - DigitalOcean. Posted: (1 week ago) › Author: Erin Glass › Estimated Reading Time: 7 mins Courses 488 View detail Preview site

How do you structure a course?

3:378:04How to outline and structure an online course (Make an AMAZING course)YouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipThink about where your student is now and the end result you'd like to create has opposite banks ofMoreThink about where your student is now and the end result you'd like to create has opposite banks of a river what major milestones. Will they need to achieve to arrive on the other side of the bridge.

What is a course design?

Course design is the process and methodology of creating quality learning environments and experiences for students. Through deliberate and structured expose to instructional materials, learning activities, and interaction, students are able to access information, obtain skills, and practice higher levels of thinking.

What is a good course design?

Data suggest that a good course design that includes technology should always be two things: simple, for the students to be engaged [6] [7], and free so that students can use what technology they think expresses their needs the most, while also deciding how to use it - autonomy is core to successful course design ...

What is simple course design?

What I like about this approach is that it's a single course yet meets the needs at a more individual level. One person can learn through the content, and another through the activities. Or they can learn through both. And it meets the client's demand to have all of the content present.Jun 7, 2016

How to prepare for a new course?

Begin the process early , giving yourself as much time as you can to plan a new course. Successful courses require careful planning and continual revision. Consult with colleagues who have taught the same or similar courses to learn from their strategies and their general impressions of the students who typically take the course.

What is course planning?

Course planning is a continual process, as illustrated by the diagram below. Each of the steps is necessarily undertaken with the others in mind, and each will necessarily undergo revision each time you teach a particular course. As you plan and revise courses, remember the importance of teaching core concepts and critical-thinking skills.

How to teach more material than you can cover in the allotted time?

Instructors often plan initially to teach more material than they can cover in the allotted time. Determine the structure of the course; arrange the topics in a logical order. Developing a rationale that guides the structure of the course can help you explain the material more clearly to the students.

How to define course goals?

When you define the course goals, focus on student learning. One way to formulate these goals is to determine what students should be learning in terms of content, cognitive development, and personal development. Be as specific as you can and make sure that the goals define learning in ways that can be measured.

How to teach chemistry?

Teach students problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. Demonstrate how chemistry is used in other fields and in everyday situations. Teach students the beauty of chemistry. Determine course content. Select the major topics and determine the order in which you will teach them. Select the main topics to be covered.

Why is it important to plan your course design?

Careful planning at the course design stage not only makes teaching easier and more enjoyable, it also facilitates student learning. Once your course is planned, teaching involves implementing your course design on a day-to-day level.

How to check a syllabus?

View syllabus specific information on how to: 1 Write a syllabus for a new course 2 Revise a syllabus 3 Check your syllabus against Faculty Senate recommendations 4 View samples of syllabi

How to make an online course more engaging?

An easy way to make online courses more engaging is to stimulate the student visually. This means pictures and videos. The simplest method of using picture and videos in an online course would be constructing your online class more like a PowerPoint presentation:

What is the most important part of creating an online course?

One of the most important components of creating an online course is setting a learning goal for the course . However, there’s more to it. Every online course consists of various sections, and each individual section also needs to have a clear learning goal.

What is the gender of MOOCs?

Gender. On average, the gender make-up for MOOCs is 53% female and 47% male. However, in some subjects such as engineering courses, the ratio can shift heavily, with up to 85% of students being male. Level of education. The majority of online course students are highly educated with a Bachelor’s degree or higher.

What does it mean to get started teaching?

Which means you need to get your knowledge together.

What is the target audience of an online course?

The target audience is the group of people to whom you are writing your course.

Do you have to create all the content for an online course?

That being said, you don’t need to create all of the content for your online course before you start selling it. It’s always better to start off with a smaller batch of content, as this will allow you to take in feedback from your students and make improvements accordingly.

Is it a waste of time to create an online course?

It’s crucial that you decide on a specific course subject in the beginning phase of creating your online course. Be as specific as possible.

How to teach deliberate practice?

Here’s a better pedagogy that fits the requirements of deliberate practice: 1 Ask students to enumerate the mechanics they already know on a piece of paper. 2 For students who knew anything, give each student feedback on which ones they got right, which they got close to right, and which were wrong. If they got them all right, enlist them in your army of students to give feedback. 3 For each mechanic a student didn’t know, have them watch a short video illustrating and describing the mechanic. 4 Return to step 1), unless all students got all of the mechanics right.

What is the goal of learning objectives in Zelda?

Devise and sequence learning objectives. The first Zelda game. The fundamental goal of any course is to help students learn something. Deciding what that something is usually comes in the form of learning objectives, which are some statement of what a student will know after completing a course.

How many hours of prep for a quarter?

In all, for a quarter long course like I teach, that means spending 100 hours of prep before the quarter starts and another 10 per week during the quarter, plus class time. For a semester, this would be 150 hours of prep before the semester, and 10 per week during the semester plus class time.

Is a course well designed?

First, most courses aren’t well-designed or well-optimized. It’s a good idea to first evaluate the design of the materials for quality (e.g., qualities of effective deliberate practice) and extract the rationale for the design of the course from past instructors.

Should you be a cinch when you prep?

If you’ve prepped well, this should be a cinch! And if you’ve done a good job devising active, deliberate practice for everything you’re teaching, it should be engaging and fun for you and the students. Finally, if you’ve extracted action items well, you shouldn’t have a lot of unexpected work. Instead, you can just stay on top of all of the work you planned, keeping at least a week ahead of the class in terms of content creation.

Can teaching methods be transferred?

Teaching methods, especially active learning methods, depends on personality, and so they aren’t easily transferred. Because of these concerns, if you’re inheriting a course and it’s materials, I recommend first deconstructing it’s learning objectives and methods, and rebuilding it using the process above.

How to save yourself time in a class?

There is nothing wrong with borrowing or remixing material that other teachers have used for similar courses. You can save yourself a lot of time and maximize the quality of your content by reading other curriculums and adapting it to your class.

How to get students to get out of a course?

Determine learning objectives. Decide what you want students to get out of the course as a whole and out of each individual unit. These outcomes should be explicitly stated to the students and guide your development of the content. Start with objectives for individual units.

What is the most popular LMS?

The most popular LMSs are BlackBoard, Edmodo, Moodle, SumTotal, and SkillSoft. If you have some software development skills, you may want to consider an open source LMS.

What are the limitations of online learning?

One of the most significant limitations of online learning is that students can’t interact with you or each other as directly. If you don’t include an interactive aspect of the course, the education students are receiving will be little better than if they simply bought a textbook and read it on their own.

Why should each unit include some kind of interactive assignment?

Each unit should include some kind of interactive assignment so that students are consistently engaged. This type of assignment may be more difficult for math or science course. However, you can use message boards to encourage students to explain how they worked out certain problems or applied formulas.

Why is online learning so popular?

Many prefer online courses because of the convenience while others note challenges for interactive and engaged learning. Before you start designing your course, it’s important to recognize the differences that will make lesson plans originally designed for an in-person class an ...

Is there an open source LMS?

If you have some software development skills, you may want to consider an open source LMS. These software are free to use and will allow you to manually change aspects of the code to tailor the LMS to your preference. The downside is that they usually don’t come with a customer support service.

What should be included in a college syllabus?

The syllabus should include a comprehensive course schedule, the course objectives, information regarding the types of assessments that will be required ( exams, quizzes, papers, etc.), your contact information and any required institutional statements that your college may require in all of its syllabi. Write your course lectures.

What can a history professor teach?

For instance, history professors may teach a course in sports history or women's history in addition to teaching U.S. history survey courses. Creating a course requires extensive planning and a high level of organization. Create a course proposal to be reviewed by the department head or committee in charge of curriculum decisions at your school.

What is the joy of teaching?

One of the joys of teaching at college level is the opportunity to create a course in your area of specialization. College professors often teach survey courses as a regular part of their teaching duties, but many also teach upper-division courses in more specialized areas of study. For instance, history professors may teach a course in sports ...

How to design a curriculum?

1. Define the purpose of the curriculum. Your curriculum should have clear topic and purpose. The topic should be appropriate for the age of the students and the environment in which the curriculum will be taught. If you are asked to design a course, ask yourself questions about the general purpose of the course.

How long is a two hour class?

The difference between a two-hour class that meets once a week for three weeks, and a two-hour class that meets every day for three months is significant. In those three weeks, you might be able to put on a 10-minute play. Three months, on the other hand, may be enough time for a full production.

What is formative assessment?

Formative assessments are usually smaller, more informal assessments that provide feedback on the learning process so you can make changes to the curriculum throughout the unit. Although formative assessments are usually a part of the daily lesson plan, they can also be included in the unit descriptions.

What is curriculum in education?

This article has been viewed 566,414 times. A curriculum often consists of a guide for educators to teach content and skills. Some curricula are general road maps, while others are quite detailed and give instructions for day to day learning. Developing a curriculum can be quite challenging, especially when expectations have such a large range.

How long does a unit last?

The number of units varies by curriculum and they can last anywhere between one week and eight weeks. A unit title can be one word or a short sentence. A unit about character development, for example, could be called, “Creating deep characters.”. ...

What are unit topics?

Organize your brainstorm or state standards into unified sections that follow a logical sequence. Units can cover big ideas like love, planets, or equations, and important topics like multiplication or chemical reactions.

Where is Emily Listmann?

Emily Listmann is a private tutor in San Carlos, California. She has worked as a Social Studies Teacher, Curriculum Coordinator, and an SAT Prep Teacher. She received her MA in Education from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2014.

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Seven Steps to Designing A Class

  • 1. Devise and sequence learning objectives
    The fundamental goal of any course is to help students learn something. Deciding what that something is usually comes in the form of learning objectives, which are some statement of what a student will know after completing a course. To illustrate, let’s use a running example of a cour…
  • 2. Ideate instruction, practice, and feedback for objectives
    Once you have a list of learning objectives, the next task I like to do is brainstorm ideas about how to teach each of the learning objectives. As I’ve noted elsewhere, good teaching comes down to deliberate practice. This means: 1) adapting practice to what your students know, 2) offering pra…
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How Long Does This take?

  • Obviously, our little example doesn’t really capture the scope or scale of a quarter or semester long course. And if you’re prepping for a whole year in a K-12 setting, you have an even greater challenge. I find that after a decade of teaching, prepping a new course can take me about 5 hours per 1 hour of instruction, not including the actual time for instruction. That includes time for devi…
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What If You’Re Inheriting Course Materials?

  • If you’re getting materials from another instructor, you might be tempted to just use them, assuming they’re well-designed and well-optimized. There are a couple of reasons this is a bad idea. First, most courses aren’t well-designed or well-optimized. It’s a good idea to first evaluate the design of the materials for quality (e.g., qualities of effective deliberate practice) and extract …
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Can’T I Just Do Lectures, Homeworks, and exams?

  • Sure. You can use the whole process I devised above, but just with lectures and exams. Students will learn less, you’ll be more bored, and you’ll still spend the same amount of time designing slides, writing exams and homeworks, and grading them, so I don’t really think it saves you anything, other than potential embarrassment from failed pedagogical experiments. When most …
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