Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning

We'll kick off the summer course design series with an overview of backward design, a simple course design method that will help you ensure proper alignment of objectives, assessments, and activities within your course.

This session will provide tools to create a classroom that is conducive to accessibility and inclusivity. Your role in determining content for your class, along with choices we make as teachers, influence a student’s sense of belonging. This session will delve into strategies and perspectives to create the right conditions to make your course a learning community.

Learning objectives are the foundation of a good course. You must be clear about these objectives so you can build a course that helps students achieve them. In this workshop, you’ll get some practice using Bloom’s Taxonomy to set objectives at the appropriate level, and you’ll learn about other important aspects of crafting good learning objectives.

This workshop will focus on developing assessments designed to help students achieve the learning objectives in your class. We will examine different types of assessments. Attendees will work together to develop sample assessments that are appropriate for their learning objectives, with a focus on the long-term goals for student learning in the course.

Active learning is critical to student engagement and retention of material. In this workshop, you will learn about ways to help your students actively engage with course material to achieve the learning goals of your course.

In this session, we will address ways to plan assignments and course materials that support your learning objectives when students engage with the material outside of class. The workshop will include approaches and resources to design homework and study tools that promote meaningful and active learning experiences for your students.

Effective feedback is important for student success. In this workshop, we will cover a variety of approaches to providing constructive and efficient feedback in different learning situations. The session will help you identify where students could use feedback in your course, what constitutes good feedback, and ways to encourage students to engage with your comments.

We’ll wrap up the series by thinking about that crucial document that often serves as a student’s first impression of the course: your syllabus. We’ll also consider how to establish course policies that are fair, sensible, and consistent with other aspects of your course design.