Resources

The next few sections will lead you through our course design process and considerations by topic.  You may want to return to this section later to spend more time with these resources individually.

About backward design

Overview

One of the key elements of our instructional design support is facilitating a course design (or redesign) process using backward design. This process is rarely linear or clear-cut, and often the faculty we support are unable to start from scratch with new course goals and outcomes, but it’s crucial to coach them throughout this process in how to make decisions about assignments, content, and activities based on alignment to course outcomes.

Essential ID foundational knowledge

Our IDs need to have a strong command of the process itself, the underlying mindset, and the techniques, strategies, and tools for facilitating the process with an instructor.

Resources and reading

An introduction

From Teaching@OhioState: A brief explainer video on backward design:

 A great primer

Read this first:

Fink, L. D. Integrated course design: https://www.ideaedu.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/IDEA%20Papers/IDEA%20Papers/Idea_Paper_42.pdf

Two foundational texts

These two books, one the full version of the approach above, are worth reading later and referring back to over time.

Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. Ebook: http://osu.worldcat.org/oclc/849822730

Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Ebook: http://osu.worldcat.org/oclc/60756429

Goals and Outcomes

Essential ID foundational knowledge

Our IDs should be able to guide faculty through the process of articulating meaningful course goals and measurable outcomes (ready for assessment of student learning) as well as revising or providing feedback on existing outcomes.

Reading and resources

The foundational books

Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. Ebook: http://osu.worldcat.org/oclc/849822730

Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Ebook: http://osu.worldcat.org/oclc/60756429

Other

McTighe, J., & Wiggins, G. P. (2013). Essential questions: Opening doors to student understanding. Ebook: http://osu.worldcat.org/oclc/843880898 [A core course-organizing approach, from Understanding by Design, where essential questions frame what students learning]

Nelson, C. E. (1999). On the persistence of unicorns: The trade-off between content and critical thinking revisited. Digital copy: http://mypage.iu.edu/~nelson1/99_PersistenceUnic.pdf [Nelson’s article walks through the supports we can provide at each stage of critical thinking as well as the barriers we might unintentionally include.]

Job aids and optional worksheets

The following may be useful for IDs on some course projects, especially those that are starting from scratch with course goals and outcomes.

Course goals planning sheet
Job aid for writing (i.e., the actual sentence structure) of outcomes

Visual guide to Bloom’s taxonomy

Content and organization

Essential ID foundational knowledge

Our IDs should be able to facilitate conversations with each instructor about the organization of the course (and how to make this visible and meaningful to students as a learning journey) and the organization and sequence of the weeks or modules (with strategies to make this sequence clear).

When it comes to the choice of topics, our IDs should be able to share backward-design based principles for choosing content (and coaching away from a “coverage” mindset) and to make specific recommendations about strategies and resources for parallel content.

Choosing course content

FromTeaching@OhioState, an animated overview of some key principles for choosing course content:

Organizing the course as a learning journey

Some common, potentially meaningful, ways to organize content to align to how knowledge is organized in the discipline (from the Berkeley Center for Teaching and Learning):

  • chronologically
  • simple to complex
  • concrete to abstract
  • theory to applications
  • around a set of questions/problems/case studies
  • disciplinary classifications
  • how relationships occur in the real world
  • how students will use the information in social, personal, or career settings
  • how major concepts and relationships are organized in the discipline
  • how students learn
  • how knowledge has been created in the field
  • macro/micro
  • distal/proximal
  • phenomenon/structure

Examples

Judy Ridgeway (Center for Life Sciences Education): https://youtu.be/HCoJ8vo_eIQ

Julie Field (Archaeology): https://youtu.be/ZKcDtB9jrqU

Organizing modules effectively

Current best practice for designing online courses strongly recommends a modular structure, wherein the learning of the course is divided into time-based (w.g., weekly) sections with a sequence of activities (sometimes self-contained units of instruction), and those sections follow a regular, but not rigid, pattern and contain some clues for students about how to approach the tasks.
A well-structured module for the course can do all of the following:

  • provide information for students about how to structure their time and effort (by giving them, at a glance, a picture of how much work there is and what kind of learning they’re doing)
  • give students clues about the underlying logic of what the instructor has chosen for them to do (by creating clear links between the pieces–say, labeling a reading as a key resource for an assignment rather than putting it into an unrelated “readings” page)
  • convey the instructor’s identity as a teacher and contribute to a positive (technology-mediated) learning environment

Examples

Slide deck of some module organization structures

Resources

Workload estimator from Rice: https://cte.rice.edu/workload

From other universities:

Parallel content

Ohio State’s Course Design Institute uses the term parallel content for topics and skill areas that an instructor needs to provide instruction for in order for students to successfully complete the course assignments and activities. The list below breaks down into categories some of these common skills and provides links to resources.

In online courses, communication skills, technological skills, and cognitive skills take on particular importance. Students will have to self-regulate, etc., and we also have opportunities to address these skills directly, to give support, to allow space for reflection. One benefit of online delivery is that it enables students to decide how much time to spend learning parallel content. If you set up parallel content in such a way that students who need it can take advantage of it, then the experienced students don’t need to spend as much time. You can provide links to resources that people need in the places where they need them.

When you identify parallel content that needs to be addressed, these three strategies will often address the need:

  • An “orientation” task or module in the first week that requires students to set up technology, learn the course structure, read the syllabus before they can proceed.
  • Just-in-time resources (like technical instructions, links to library resources, etc.)
  • Structuring and labeling of items in modules to give students structure and guidance in how to plan their effort

Communication Skills

writing, oral presentation, visual communication

Students may especially struggle to write in discipline-specific genres that are unfamiliar to them.

Strategies

Rhetorical Skills

persuading others, writing in a way that expresses and shares meaning to be reconstructed by the reader

Students may struggle to identify and adapt to specific needs of different audiences and situations.

Strategies

Collaborative Skills

working with others

Students may not have experience with the kinds of group work your assignments require and may especially struggle with addressing conflicts or differences in effort.

Strategies

  • For brief or ad hoc group work, provide roles and other specific guidance about how members should interact.

  • For longer-term group work, include introductory activities in which group members discuss and create written agreements about their responsibilities to each other.

  • Provide structured opportunities to collect feedback from group members on how things are going

Technological Skills

ability to use a particular technology important to a discipline or career

Students need to know how to accomplish any task you assign to them and how to get help if something goes wrong.

Strategies

  • Link to relevant help pages (such as the CarmenCanvas Student Guides) for each function of each technology you assign.

  • Include the link as close as possible to the point where students will be using the technology, such as in the assignment prompt.

  • For any assignment students will complete for significant points, include a minimal-point version using the same technology that they can complete ahead of time to ensure that everything is working before there are real stakes.

  • Only ask students to engage with technology that serves your learning outcomes. Having an explicit rationale for why they need to engage with a new technology goes a long way

Graphic Skills

tables, graphs, etc., including mathematical/statistical skills

Students will likely have very different levels of experience and skill expressing ideas in graphical form.

Strategies

  • Be explicit about how you expect the final graph or chart to be created: will you accept photos of a hand drawn sketch roughly to scale? Or do you expect auto-CAD or statistical software outputs?

  • Provide links to relevant software tutorials or supplemental videos directly in the assignments where they relate AND in a course resource module.

  • Employ Universal Design for Learning principles: design assignments to allow students to complete them in a medium they prefer, so that they can leverage their strengths.

Research Skills

reading about and understanding (and maybe conducting) particular kinds of research (e.g., surveys, ethnographies, textual analysis)

Students may have limited experience and incomplete understanding of academic research processes, and they may especially struggle with the particular needs of research in specific disciplines.

Strategies

Analytical Skills

analyzing certain kinds of documents and/or situations (e.g., medical, nutritional, psychological, etc., diagnoses; historical analyses)

This one is tricky, but most college-level skills in most disciplines are actually bundles of lots of smaller preliminary skills. Ensuring that students have the prior knowledge to complete complex tasks can be difficult, but also make-or-break for a given assignment.

Strategies

  • Scaffold complex activities to ensure that students can (or have a chance to learn how to) perform all the necessary sub-tasks.

  • Track down teaching-specific journals in your disciplinary area: these are most likely to address the specific analytical skills required to work in your field.

  • Consult with staff of the University Institute for Teaching and Learning to identify likely obstacles in your courses.

  • If specifically mathematical or statistical analytical skills are needed, the Math and Statistics Learning Center is an excellent resource.

Problem-solving Skills

diagnosing situations, devising solutions, planning and implementation

What counts as a problem — and what counts as a solution — can vary widely among disciplines, as can the types of strategies considered normal or taboo. Especially if you want your students to think outside the box, it will help to make sure they know where the box is.

Strategies
  • Allow for lots of practice paired with feedback
  • Unpack your disciplinary expertise: how, specifically, do people in your field approach a problem?

Cognitive Skills

meta-cognition, reflection, self-regulation, self-motivation

These elusive skills can make a huge difference for students, especially those whose educational backgrounds have not included as much college preparation.

Strategies
  • Include metacognition as an explicit course goal with outcomes
  • Use CATs at regular interval to encourage students to reflect on their effort, strategies, and progress and the relationships between those categories.
  • Sandra McGuire, Teach Students How To Learn.

Creativity

inventiveness, generating multiple and/or novel alternatives

Some say that creativity cannot be taught. They are wrong. However, what counts as creativity is a constructed category, so you will need to ensure your students understand what you mean by the term.

Strategies
  • Scaffold assignments to isolate steps that most require creativity to enable feedback.
  • Incorporate brainstorming and other generative practices as part of assignments or at least as alternatives for students hitting writers’ block.
  • Use inclusive practices to recognize and encourage existing cultural differences in approaches within your students

Professional dispositions

recognizing and performing the norms and practices of relevant occupational group

Professionals are made not born, and students may or may not have experience outside the classroom to draw on.

Strategies
  • Invite professionals from your field to visit your class and/or record material for students.
  • Assign students to role-play professional situations with each other.
  • If students have a range of professional experience, arrange for them to interact with each other.

Assignments

Essential ID foundational knowledge

Our IDs provide a tremendous amount of value in these course collaborations by bringing with them a broad repertoire of examples (from past courses, from other colleagues’ courses, from outside the institution) and ideas (from scholarship, from college-teaching literature, and elsewhere) about engaging, meaningful, and authentic assignments. A priority for our instructional designers is to provide guidance to instructors about designing assignments based on the idea of assessing course outcomes; we focus on this framing and mindset even when instructors aren’t in a place to engage in a whole broader redesign using backward design.

How we think about assignments

Getting started

UCAT’s overview page on designing assignments: https://ucat.osu.edu/bookshelf/teaching-topics/assessing-student-learning/designing-assignments/

Helpful framework: Transparent assignments

One framework we discuss often on our team is transparency, which puts focus on helping students to understand how and why they are learning or practicing something in a particular way. The approach, led by M. Winkelmes, connects to research that shows that transparency about assignments leads to increases in student success.
Two helpful resources, provided by Winkelmes at the Transparency in Learning and Teaching project website:

  • Transparent Assignment Template for faculty
  • Checklist for Designing Transparent Assignments

Helpful framework: Authentic assignments

Another well-known design strategy for assignments is the concept of authenticity, which has to do with real-world problems and non-instructor audiences for assignments.

From Herrington, Oliver, and Reeves (2003): Authentic assignments…

  • Have real-world relevance: Activities match as nearly as possible the real world tasks of professionals in practice rather than decontextualised or classroom based tasks.
  • Are ill-defined, requiring students to define the tasks and sub-tasks needed to complete the activity: Problems inherent in the activities are not explicitly defined for students and are open to multiple interpretations rather than easily solved by the application of existing algorithms. Learners must identify their own unique tasks and sub-tasks in order to complete the major task.
  • Comprise complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time: Activities are completed in days, weeks and months rather than minutes or hours. They require significant investment of time and intellectual resources.
  • Provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from different perspectives, using a variety of resources: The task affords learners the opportunity to examine the problem from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives, rather than allowing a single perspective that learners must imitate to be successful. The use of a variety of resources rather than a limited number of preselected references requires students to detect relevant from irrelevant information.
  • Provide the opportunity to collaborate: Collaboration is integral to the task, both within the course and the real world, rather than achievable by an individual learner.
    Provide the opportunity to reflect: Activities need to enable learners to make choices and reflect on their learning both individually and socially.
  • Can be integrated and applied across different subject areas and lead beyond domain specific outcomes: Activities encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and enable students to play diverse roles thus building robust expertise rather than knowledge limited to a single well-defined field or domain.
  • Are seamlessly integrated with assessment: Assessment of activities is seamlessly integrated with the major task in a manner that reflects real world assessment, rather than separate artificial assessment removed from the nature of the task.
  • Create polished products valuable in their own right rather than as preparation for something else: Activities culminate in the creation of a whole product rather than an exercise or sub-step in preparation for something else.
  • Allow competing solutions and diversity of outcome: Activities allow a range and diversity of outcomes open to multiple solutions of an original nature, rather than a single correct response obtained by the application of rules and procedures.

Pre-built templates and examples

DE Team template repository, with customizable example assignments, prompts, and resources: https://osu.instructure.com/courses/9790/modules

Types of assignments

Writing assignments

  • Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing handout on writing in online courses: https://cstw.osu.edu/sites/cstw.osu.edu/files/Writing%20Online%20Flyer.pdf
  • Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing booklet “Writing to Learn Critical Thinking Activities For Any Classroom”: https://cstw.osu.edu/sites/cstw.osu.edu/files/WritingtoLearnBookletv2016online.pdf

Research assignments

As a start, see the University Libraries overview of instructor resources for research assignments: https://library.osu.edu/blogs/instructorresources/

Collaborative assignments

“Enhancing Learning — and More! — Through Cooperative Learning” (Millis), an excellent overview of key considerations for group assignments: https://www.ideaedu.org/Portals/0/Uploads/Documents/IDEA%20Papers/IDEA%20Papers/IDEA_Paper_38.pdf

Case study assignments

See the learning activities section on case studies.

Interactive multimedia assignments

See the interactive learning objects page for information about this type of assignment approach.

Quizzes and exams

Resources
General advice

The “testing effect” or the ability to practice frequent retrieval of information through low-stakes formative quizzing, is an evidence based practice show to increase comprehension and retention of foundational information. In short, quizzes can be a great tool for helping students learn (Lang, 2016).

Quizzing in online courses can provide students with freedom and convenience, allowing them to practice learning and demonstrate their achievements on their own timeline and in environments more conducive to concentration than a crowded lecture hall. However, with those opportunities can come risks: students may be tempted to rush through or focus on rote memorization (in place of focused practice and critical thinking) due to boredom or grade-driven motivation. Online quizzes are susceptible to academic misconduct such as sharing answers or using unapproved materials. Well designed and implemented online quizzing can reduce these problems. Some best practices to reduce the likelihood of these issues include:

  • Frequent, low-stakes testing: The most effective use of quizzing is to provide students with regular opportunities to test their understanding with minimal risk to their grades. The frequency deepens students’ memory recall, while the low stakes reduce motivation for cheating. Building these activities as self-grading quizzes reduces their impact on your time and energy.
  • Use quiz banks: Carmen makes it possible to configure quizzes so that each student (on each attempt) is presented with a random selection from a much larger pool of questions, so that no two students receive the same quiz and no student receives the same quiz twice (if you allow multiple attempts). At the same time, you can require that all students answer certain questions, if advisable. The ratio of questions available to questions posed varies with a range of factors, but 5:1 is normally sufficient to make collaboration infeasible and multiple attempts productive.
  • Consider using Proctorio: Ohio State makes Proctorio available for all courses at no additional cost. (It is already paid for by contract.) Proctorio is an automated, browser-based tool that enables instructors to limit and/or record selected student activities while they are taking a quiz and provides automated, but customizable, analysis of the information it gathers to help identify behaviors that might be inappropriate. It can enable students to take quizzes without traveling to a classroom or testing center to sit for a proctored exam. Before you require this tool, however, consider whether the benefits are balanced with the trade offs of adding another layer of tech for students to navigate, along with the tone it sets during testing. We’ll discuss these considerations further in Module 6.
  • Enhance quizzes with multimedia and feedback

Rubrics

Teaching-learning activities

Essential ID foundational knowledge

Our IDs provide tremendous help to instructors by coming to each project or consultation ready to share ideas about teaching-learning activities that can work well in an online course. These conversations (along with the planning of assignments) are often where we can provide the most value, championing good college teaching methods, coaching on sound online mechanics, and being ready to explore discipline-based teaching practices in the online context.

Principles

Choosing effective teaching strategies

Video from the UITL/ODEE Course Design Institute for Online Courses

Taxonomy of activities for active learning in an online class

Adapted from L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences (2013) (e-book available from OSU Library):

Getting information and ideas

Experience and practice

Dialogue and reflection

Direct:

Direct:

With self

  • original data

  • original sources

  • real doing, in authentic settings (documented to share online)

  • direct field observation (documented to share online)

  • periodic (e.g., weekly) written reflections or blog posts

Indirect

Indirect:

With peers

  • secondary data and sources

  • video lectures

  • textbooks

  • direct field observation (documented to share online)

  • case studies

  • simulations, role play, and interactive experiences

  • audio and video of real examples

  • group discussion or collaborative writing

  • synchronous student discussions via videoconference

Examples

Activities: Getting information and ideas

Original data, sources
Secondary data and sources
Video or audio lectures

Textbooks, instructional materials

E-learning modules or rich web content