What is transparency?

Think back to your own experience of being a student on your first day of college. Try to name the feelings you experienced. Along with pride and excitement and fear, you may have also experienced confusion or disorientation as you located the classroom or accessed the course site. Perhaps you felt overwhelmed as you read your first college syllabus and tried to make sense of what was going to happen next.

The concept of transparency is extremely important to inclusive course design because it offers what many people need at the beginning of a new path: clear directions, shared expectations, and time to integrate ourselves into a new community of learners.

Rather than assume that students will “figure it out on their own,” transparent design allows educators to communicate the scope and structure of learning objectives, required coursework, and how it will be evaluated. As a framework, transparent design recognizes that unfamiliarity with the hidden social curriculums and norms of higher education can exclude certain student groups. Transparent design helps to ensure that students with first-generation status, low socioeconomic status, experiences of disability, and/or opportunity gaps in their education can orient themselves and feel invited to collaborate with the learning community. Researcher Mary Anne Winkelmes outlines the significant learning benefits of the Transparency Framework in the “Unwritten Rules of College” (Video, 39 seconds).

Figure 5.2 Stripping out the “hidden curriculum” of college is an equity-minded choice. When have you encountered a “hidden curriculum” in your own professional development? How would transparent design made a difference for you in that moment? See also: Video Transcript for Mary Ann Winkelmes Unwritten Rules for College Success [permission pending].

Two Interventions for Transparent Learning Design

In addition to following the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Project, revising authors can focus on two interventions for revising your textbook chapters and aligning course packs:

• a consistent sequence or structure that allows for intuitive navigation or wayfinding
• clear alignment between learning objectives and activities

For example, to help students find their way as learners, courses use predictable structures and meaningful naming conventions in course documents and the course site. Predictable structures are important to students because:

• patterns of shared information build trust between student and instructor
• students can spend their time learning rather than hunting for definitions or struggling to understand expectations

Alignment between learning objectives, activities, and assessments is critical to inclusive learning design. Alignment ensures that student efforts and activities clearly relate to the ultimate goals of the course or textbook. When you design with alignment in mind, every learning element directly supports students in practicing and achieving the learning objectives necessary to meet desired outcomes.

In the Targeted Pathways project, courses are designed with the transparent design template from the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) Project. This framework defines the purpose, tasks, and criteria for success in all assignments.

Revising Alignment: Activity

The following H5P activities will help you to strengthen the alignment between chapter content and chapter learning objectives, as well as between the revised textbook and course maps.