Think about being dropped in the middle of a national forest. As you start looking around, how do you think you would feel? Perhaps you will be amazed at the wonders of the natural world and feel extremely free as you can walk anywhere you want without any trails or signs to guide you. On the other hand, you may feel overwhelmed, lost, and even downright despaired due to the lack of structure and defined paths to move forward. And what about the bears, mountain lions, or moose, oh my!?!
Similarly, designing a course, whether a newly-conceived elective or a bread-and-butter foundational course, can simultaneously be both exhilarating and terrifying as well (minus the wildlife). With a blank canvas of designing a course, you can take things in so many different directions, make this course all your own, and share it with your students with (hopefully) transformative outcomes. But this blank canvas can also instill feelings of fear and doubt as the seemingly unlimited potential of the course can lead you down many rabbit holes that don’t result in fruitful outcomes.
Despite these polar opposite feelings that occur, designing courses from scratch is my favorite academic pursuit, which is why I wrote a book on course design, founded my own business to help faculty design their courses and use evidence-based instructional practices to improve their student outcomes, and even made a card deck to make course design hands-on and fun! I hope that you will be able to use the following brief how-to guide to help you get started on your course design journey. And, that this will lead you towards a more engaging and impactful experience for you and your students alike.
Step 1: Start with your outcomes in mind
When starting to learn how to design any STEM courses, I encourage you to use with the principles of backward design to guide your process. Start with what your overarching learning goals are for the course (i.e. what do you want your students to be able to do!) before you think about assessments or activities and course materials.
These learning goals can be focused on content knowledge, technical skills, or affect or attitudes. Just remember that these are the big picture goals that you want your students to achieve by the end of your course and that these goals should guide all future design considerations. You’ll also do the same for each lesson of your course by designing learning objectives too.
Step 2: See what else is already out there
You don’t have to start your course design journey from scratch. Get inspiration from materials that are already out there by searching the web, looking for published papers and course materials in journals and databases, asking your colleagues for their course materials, and checking in with your favorite generative AI tool for ideas. There is nothing wrong with using existing materials and ideas so that you don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel… (unless it is a brand-spanking new course that is!).
Step 3: Decide on types of summative assessments
Once you have your learning goals in place, you need to figure out how you will know if students’ have accomplished them or not. Now is the time to start to brainstorm on the types of assessments you will use for this critical matter. Consider using low-stakes pre-class reading quizzes, in-class problem sets and activities, after-class homework and higher-stakes quizzes, exams, projects, essays, and reports, among others. Try to include some authentic assessments which are matched to real-world goals or expectations that your students will encounter someday. You can also decide on a grading schema at this point.
Step 4: Plan your schedule, syllabus, lessons, assessments, and activities
Having high-quality materials for use in and out of the classroom is an important step to accomplish when learning how to design STEM courses. We all need materials to teach from and with and so now is a good time to decide on that. Do you want to create all of your own materials, use open-education resources (OER) on the web, or use those created to meet the needs of educators and students alike provided by an education company publisher like Macmillan Learningfor a fee? If the latter, make sure to understand justify the cost and make sure all of the bells and whistles are the ones worth it to you and your students actually need. Use courseware and textbook adoption rubrics such as the ones listed here to help you with this process.
The syllabus is a critical piece of the course design process and acts as a document that clearly describes your course goals, content, assessments, activities, policies, and more. Think of it as a contract between you and your students which gives them all of the information that they need to succeed and flourish in your course. While the syllabus can be designed at any time, now is a good time to start working on it as you have many of the big pieces of your course designed. You can find a syllabus template modeled off of my courses in my book.
With many of the big-picture items crossed off the design list, now it is time to actually plan the day-to-day lessons, activities, and assignments. First, write and plan out lesson-level learning objectives which state what students should be able to do for each lesson or day of class. Next, use a spreadsheet or a whiteboard or a bunch of sticky notes (whatever suits you best!) to plan out the daily and weekly schedule throughout your term. You can find a sample scheduling template which Justin uses for his own courses in his book.
Now that you have the lesson-level learning outcomes and a schedule, you know need to design the actual assessments (e.g. pre-class reading quizzes, homework, quizzes) and activities (e.g. pre-class reading guides, in-class active learning exercises, slide decks) that you will use throughout the course. I strongly advise againstDO NOT makinge them all at once before the course starts; rather, make a couple weeks’ worth of materials which will give you a step up on the class schedule but will also allow you to adapt and make changes to future assessments and activities as the course proceeds. Check out a bunch of my materials here.
Step 5: Teach the class(!) and assess, review, reflect, iterate
Having a colleague or two (or six) take a look at your course materials and plan will give you huge insights into how your course is looking and how it might work in the wild. Having peer feedback earlier and continually throughout the course design process is ideal, but at least get some other eyeballs on your materials and plans before teaching the course for the first time. Once you are in the classroom, consider having someone come watch you teach as well as peer observation of your teaching can truly be illuminating. Learn more about the importance of peer review and getting feedback on your teaching in my book.
Once you have your course designed, ask yourself what feels right about it and what feels like it needs work. You likely won’t know for sure until you actually step foot in the classroom and actually teach the course, but use your instincts to make changes as needed. When the term is underway and Once you are teaching the course, assess how it is going by collecting student performance data, frequent student feedback, and peer observation feedback. Be sure to keep a “teaching journal” and reflect on each day of class and takes notes of what is going well and what isn’t (because there will certainly be things that do not go swimmingly the first time). Use all of these data to make positive changes and iterate for the next term.
You got this!
If you, your colleagues, or your department would like a guide to help them on their course design journey, please reach out to Justin anytime at justin@recombinanteducation.com or check out www.recombinanteducation.com.
