Backward Design and Course Development

Backward design

Backward Design

Though this course has focused on the materials used in teaching, it is a good idea to take a step back to look at what you want your students to learn. What are the goals and desired outcomes for your course? Put another way, think about course goals and outcomes before looking at and choosing course materials such as textbooks.

Though we cannot spend too much time on backwards design, here are five steps to consider when designing/building your course:

  1. Learning Outcomes
    • What do you want your students to learn?
    • These could be the official course Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) as well as additional learning goals you have identified.
  2. Assessment
    • How will you know that students achieved the learning outcomes?
    • What assessments or tasks will students perform to demonstrate understanding?
  3. Learning resources
    • How will you teach? Plan learning activities and instruction.
    • What is the purpose of each lesson and how does it fit into the course as a whole?
    • What materials and resources will support the learning outcomes. 

In other words, when designing backwards, looking for OER should be the last step you consider after you have designed the rest of your course. Traditional for-profit publisher materials have a set structure that often controls our course design.  Because OER is more flexible, we can focus on our students first and then find resources that support student learning in our course.

Using OER allows us to build a course that is focused on:

  • what students are expected to learn
    • We can customize course resources to directly align with our course design.
  • how we want to teach the course
    • OER allows for more academic freedom because we are not tied to content created by others.
  • what our students need to support their learning
    • We can add resources for topics that our students tend to find challenging.
    • We can adapt the content to speak to our students lived experiences and academic background.
    • We can work with students to build resources to support their success.

For more on Backward design see: Bowen, Ryan S., (2017). Understanding by Design Links to an external site.. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.