Nov 14 2007
Objectives-Based Course Design
Backwards Course Design helps faculty plan their course assignments and activities around the goals they are trying to achieve. As the attached worksheets suggest, faculty begin Backwards Course Design by identifying their objectives or desired student learning outcomes. Faculty then determine what would serve as appropriate evidence that students have achieved the objectives; evidence could include successful completion of objectives-based assignments or the ability to apply previous ideas to a new task. Next, faculty plan relevant direct instruction and related student activities to support student learning.
This step-by-step strategy for course design helps faculty ensure that their classes support the course objectives and that they are scaffolding students’ progress towards meeting those objectives.
Designing Your Course: Desired Results
All sections of College Writing aim to achieve the following results.
| Shared Outcomes for English 110: College Writing | ||||||
| Objectives: Students develop a/an… |
Sophisticated writing process—including invention, peer responding, revising, and editing—that results in a clear, effective, well edited public piece | Sophisticated understanding of the relationship of purpose, audience, and voice, and an awareness that writing expectations and conventions vary across rhetorical situations | Appreciation for the capacity of writing to change oneself and the world | |||
| Experiences: Students will… |
Write to persuade by analyzing, interpreting, researching, synthesizing, and evaluating a wide variety of sources | Write to academic audience, to non-academic audiences, and for one’s own purposes | Write on the spot (determining the audience and purpose of given writing situations) | Orally present their work/writing | ||
| Consistency: Students can expect that… |
The majority of writing in English 110 is argumentative/persuasive | Credit for process is no more than one-third of a student’s grade | Courses addressing a single theme or topic are preapproved exceptions, rather than the norm | College Writing is taught with writing as content, not as a writing-intensive course that uses writing simply to learn some other content. | ||
Designing Your Course: Determine Acceptable Evidence
| Shared Objective | Sophisticated writing process—including invention, peer responding, revising, and editing—that results in a clear, effective, well edited public piece | Sophisticated understanding of the relationship of purpose, audience, and voice, and an awareness that writing expectations and conventions vary across rhetorical situations | Appreciation for the capacity of writing to change oneself and the world |
| Acceptable Evidence (Assignments, Projects, Graded Activities, etc.)
|
Designing Your Course: Determine Acceptable Evidence – Meeting Objectives & Experiences
How could your objective-linked assignment facilitate offering students the identified shared experiences?
| Shared Experiences | Objective 1 Assignment:
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Objective 2 Assignment: | Objective 3 Assignment: |
| Writing to persuade by analyzing, interpreting, researching, synthesizing, and evaluating a wide variety of sources | |||
| Writing to academic audiences, to non-academic audiences, and for one’s one purposes | |||
| Writing on the spot | |||
| Presenting work/writing orally |
Designing Your Course: Plan Learning Experiences and Instruction
| Objective 1 Assignment:
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Objective 2 Assignment: | Objective 3 Assignment: | |
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Relevant Direct Instruction
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Related In-Class and Out-of-Class Activities to Support Student Learning & Completion of the Assignment |
Designing Your Course: Experience Checklist
Will my course design ensure that students receive instruction in and have opportunities to practice…?
- Analyzing Rhetorical Situations
- Audience & Purpose Analysis
- Convention Analysis
- Rhetoric Terminology
- Writing for Varied Audiences and Purposes
- Writing to Academic Audiences
- Writing to Non-Academic Audiences
- Writing for One’s Own Purpose
- Developing a Successful and Individualized Writing Process
- Invention (freewriting brainstorming, clustering, etc.)
- Planning & Drafting (controlling purpose/thesis, workable plan, etc.)
- Peer Response
- Self-Assessment of Writing
- Revision
- Editing
- Independently Planning & Managing the Writing Process
- Writing Academic Arguments
- Developing and Refining Research Questions
- Identifying and Evaluating Print and Electronic Sources
- Integrating Research
- Summarizing and Synthesizing Sources
- Using Source Material as Evidence
- Meeting Conventions for Citing Sources
- Presenting Work/Writing Orally
- Managing Several of the Above Strategies/Practices At Once?
Tags: course design