In this section you will continue working in your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document to draft content for review during the initial meeting with your Instructional Designer. Read on to see exactly how to personalize your course outcomes and draft the first two columns of your course map table.

Our course design process begins with a deep dive into aligning the elements of your course. Alignment between module learning objectives, activities, and assessments is critical to equity-minded learning design. This meets one of our Learner Focus criteria for success: Course-level learning outcomes and module-level objectives are aligned and use student-friendly words.

Alignment ensures that student efforts and activities clearly relate to the ultimate goals of the course. 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 other words, there will be NO busywork, which respects your students’ time and competing priorities.

Your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document is a tool to track alignment. This is why we are starting on your map right away. This is a practical way to identify when relationships between the different parts of your course are unclear.

Transparency for Equity-Minded Course Design

Alignment is key to staying learner-focused. This is because after you’ve done the hard work of making sure that all the elements in your curriculum support the course learning outcomes, you can communicate to students how all the elements fit together and get them to the learning goals for the course. This explicit communication is what instructional designers call transparency. It is one of the ways that we view curriculum design through an equity lens in the matrix we shared in Year 2, Unit 1.

Transparency is essential to equity-minded curriculum design because it offers what people need at the beginning of a new learning experience: clear directions, shared expectations, and opportunities to integrate ourselves into a new learning pathway. Rather than assume that students will figure things out on their own, transparency recognizes that unfamiliarity with the hidden social curriculums and norms of higher education can exclude certain students. 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 engage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40e1FPaJowg

Transparency also helps instructors to understand for themselves why a topic, skill, or subject is important for students to learn. Taking the time for design makes a world of connection and collaboration possible.

Our textbook manuscripts were also drafted with Transparency in Learning and Teaching as a key framework. To read or review how we approached this topic with our textbook authors, visit Year 1, Unit 3.

Using Course Maps for Alignment

A course map represents the learning pathway that you’re designing for your students. It locates assessments, feedback, activities, and content in a weekly sequence so that the alignment between these course elements and the unit-level learning objectives is clear. Since Oregon institutions use 10 or 11 week terms, your Course Map template is divided into 10 weeks and a finals week.

Although you’ve probably created a syllabus before, a course map is an entirely different type of document. Whereas a syllabus covers course policies, grading rationale, and a tentative work schedule, a course map leaps backwards to the very goals of the course itself. This method of development is called Backwards Design, created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1998). By starting with your outcomes and objectives, or what students will need to learn, you can begin to imagine how students can demonstrate achievement of these goals, and then design the kind of learning environment students will need to learn effectively.

The goals of the course map include:

• Making your course alignment clear to you, your Instructional Designer, and future educators
• Creating learning objectives and assignment placeholders for modules so that you’re ready to draft assignment prompts and rubrics in your shared Google Docs
• Creating a map for building out module content in your institutional Learning Management System (Blackboard, Moodle, D2L).

Creating a course map is an iterative process. This means you can revise it as you build out the course and before you share it with other educators. As with any creative endeavor, as you work on different parts of the course you will discover that you may want to shift things around or introduce a new assignment or create a different checkpoint. This is OK. In fact, this is great! Changing your mind is part of the design process. Starting with a focus on alignment will help you to take out what you don’t need and refine what you want to keep.

Instructional designer Flower Darby suggests that educators embrace a roundabout design model for course mapping (2021). This means expecting to take different exits for assignment development or activity planning or student engagement, and returning again and again to the main map to check for alignment. Rather than assume a linear design process, where each element marches along in perfect order, expect to get each column of your course map to “good for now” state and plan to revisit each one as you’re building your course site and assignment prompts. Following Darby’s lead, your course development will likely be a series of cycles, filling in a new column on your course map and then reflecting on how this changes content row by row.

Course-Level Learning Outcomes

Oregon’s Common Course Numbering initiative created statewide outcomes for high-enrollment courses, so you may not need to create your own. The purpose of common course numbering is to enable students to transfer credits more easily, especially if they’re taking some courses at community colleges and completing their degree at a university. If you’re interested, Resources for Common Course Numbering [Website] from the Higher Education Coordinating Commission offers more information.

Having agreed-upon statewide course level outcomes means that you are designing a course that is VERY sharable in Oregon. Designing for these outcomes ensures that all other Oregon instructors teaching this course benefit from your open course. At the same time, because your course materials will be shared with an open license, that means that other instructors have permission to customize to match how they like to teach the content.

Some instructors are required to use the predetermined course outcomes with no additions or changes. If this is the case for you, please follow your institution’s requirements when you design your course for this project.

However, we also ask you to write or rewrite at least one course level learning outcome that connects to your curriculum’s equity goals. Adding a course level outcome that directly supports your vision for your curriculum will strengthen its alignment with your values. Later, when you write the instructor guide to your course, you’ll have an opportunity to explain your choices.

Fill out the Course Learning Outcomes section above the table in your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document:

1. Copy/paste required course outcomes.
2. Rewrite at least one learning outcome in your own words underneath the required version of that outcome.
3. Optional: Write additional course outcomes (we recommend that courses have 5 learning outcomes, so consider whether the required list leaves room for additions).

The section that follows shows you exactly how to write a learning outcome that expresses what matters most to you about the learning your students will do.

Writing course learning outcomes

Consider these three pieces of advice on writing effective learning outcomes:

• Write your learning outcomes from the perspective of how you expect students to be different by the end of the course.
• Differentiate learning outcomes from the activities students will complete to demonstrate that they’ve met the outcome. If we think of learning as a journey, the outcome is the destination and the activities are the route students take to get there.
• Don’t underestimate the learning that can occur in your course. Write learning outcomes that describe the high level of learning you expect of your students (WVU Teaching and Learning Commons, 2024).

If you’re writing a course outcome from scratch, try this template:

After [meeting condition], students will be able to [action] via [criterion].

Example #1: After completing a degree in microbiology [condition], students will be able to communicate [action] scientific concepts clearly and concisely, both verbally and in writing [criterion].

Example #2: Through coursework in government and politics [condition], students will demonstrate analytical skills [action] by examining foundational theories of citizenship and government [criterion] (Office of Data Analytics, CU Boulder, 2019).

If you’re looking for inspiration, check the outcomes list in the {Course #} About This Book document for the textbook you’ll use. Authors similarly used statewide lists and may have opted to write additional outcomes. Consider how the textbook outcomes align with your own interests and the course learning outcomes of your institution.

Creating Module Topics

Module-level topics are the major content domains that students need to understand to achieve the course-level outcomes. These topics can be super high-level, like “gender and race” or “19th-century mathematicians.” At this point in the design process, your arrangement of topics is not set in stone. Remember Flower Darby’s roundabout model: It’s OK to work from a rough draft now, because you will keep coming back to check for alignment, especially after you consider your assessment methods in the next unit. You will add module-level topics to the first column of the table in your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document.

For example, in a 10-week introductory course, the first 3 weeks of modules might cover foundational content to introduce and contextualize the major questions of the course, while the next 3 weeks of modules give students time to practice complex inquiry as they engage new content, and the final 4 weeks ask students to synthesize new knowledge and skills, building toward final opportunities for reflection and conclusion.

If you’re looking for ideas, refer to the chapter titles in the {Course #} About This Book document to help rough out the themes that will anchor each module. Instructors often follow the topics of the book to support alignment and clarity for students.

For each week of your course, replace [Topic] with an actual course topic in your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document.

Weekly Module-Level Learning Objectives

While your course-level outcomes are broad, module-level learning objectives are measurable and specific. They will help you name what you want students to learn rather than what you want to teach. When a module is aligned, all content, activities, and assessments work together in support of 4 or 5 well-written learning objectives. You will add module-level learning objectives to the second column of the table in your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document.

Module-level learning objectives clearly relate to the course-level learning outcomes. One module-level learning objective might support more than one course-level outcome. This is to be expected! In fact, it strengthens course alignment for units to engage in multiple course-level outcomes at once. Right now, your job is to break down the large, intangible goals of your course into measurable parts.

We recognize that some instructors are required to use predetermined course-level outcomes with no additions or changes. In this situation, it is especially important to articulate your understanding of the weekly objectives so that you can assess student learning. By the end of your course design process you will aim for a maximum of 5 learning objectives per module for your course (though this may vary if module-level learning objectives are stretched over a 2-week unit).

Here is how to get started:

• What do you want students to know and do with this unit topic before they move on to the next week?
• What relevant words, skills, and concepts stand out to you in the course-level learning outcome?
• How will your equity lens prompt your learning objectives to differ from traditional course models in this discipline? (For example, you may cover gaps in your field, biased assumptions, or specific theorists, frameworks, or historical events.)

If you need help getting started, refer to the chapter-level learning objectives in the {Course #} About This Book document.

Choose Active Learning verbs

Many people find Bloom’s taxonomy [Website] to be a useful tool for making sure that module level objectives are written precisely. Bloom’s taxonomy has come in for critique, but we include it here because it captures a wide range of verbs for describing the work of learning.

Choosing dynamic learning verbs will help you to write measurable learning objectives. Avoid general learning verbs like “learn” and “understand” in favor of more active learning verbs like “discuss,” “analyze,” or “explain.” This can help fellow educators and students track the specific learning at stake in the unit. Don’t underestimate what students can achieve when offered the opportunity to synthesize and apply content in new contexts. Look for places where you can use learning verbs that ask students to question, interpret, describe, discuss, compare, critique, and develop.

You can use the ASU Learning Objective Builder [Website] to help you create learning objectives. This interactive tool allows you to select verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy, review example course/module/lesson objectives, and then copy your new learning objectives to your textbook outline. Alternatively, you can use the table in figure Y2 2.8 for reference.

Fill out the Learning Objectives column in your {Instructor} {Course #} Course Map document for at least the first three weeks of your course.

Licenses and Attributions for Alignment in Course Design

Open content, original

“Alignment in Course Design” by Open Oregon Educational Resources is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Open content, shared previously

“Using GenAI in Course Design” is adapted from AI Pause by Amy Hofer and Veronica Vold, licensed CC BY 4.0. Thank you to Jeff Gallant, Program Director, Affordable Learning Georgia, and Stephen Krueger, Affordable Course Content Librarian, University of Kentucky, for assistance with this blog post.

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