Every author in our project is a curriculum developer whether or not they choose to pilot a course. This is because authors create learning pathways for students through content selection, layout, and delivery. Your book will direct student attention, invite practice, and create opportunities for critical thinking, with a specific audience in mind: Oregon students taking 10-week courses. Writing directly to this audience meets our Oregon Context criteria for success.

Alignment means that all parts of your open curriculum work together so students can achieve the course outcomes. To aim for alignment, authors and instructors make their thinking transparent to other people by emphasizing the relationships between the parts and the whole. Here are a few examples of alignment in a textbook:

• Choose learning verbs in chapter learning objectives that reflect the specific work you ask students to engage in over the course of a chapter. (Learner Focus criteria for success: Chapter-level objectives are listed and aligned with the content of the chapter.)
• Write figure captions that incorporate reflection questions and context to increase student familiarity with learning objectives. (Oregon Context criteria for success: Figure captions for images, media, and tables are clearly connected to chapter learning objectives and include a statement/question inviting Oregon students to make connections with lived experience.)
• List key terms from the learning objectives to reinforce the content that is core to student learning. (Accessibility criteria for success: Up to 10 key terms are listed that reinforce chapter concepts, are defined as Glossary Terms, and are aligned with chapter-level objectives.)

In short, you will determine how every part of a chapter supports students in doing what they need to do.

In this project, alignment also means being aligned with the other writers on your team. Remember to use the Word List section of your {Course #} About This Book document to record decisions you make as a group about word choices, spelling, punctuation, and so on. Keeping track in the Word List will help your chapters stay consistent.

This project benefits from having a full-time Instructional Designer on the support team. The Instructional Designer is an expert in curriculum development and can support your team with the alignment work described in this section. Keep in mind the assistance that they can offer in these areas:

• Meeting the project’s criteria for success
• Integrating media into your chapters
• Creating engaging interactive elements
• Ensuring that our textbooks are accessible to all learners

Transparency in Equity-Minded Course Design

Alignment is a key way to stay learner-focused when you design for equity. 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, which is one of the ways that we view curriculum design through an equity lens in the matrix we shared in 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 a new learning pathway. Rather than assume that students will figure things out on their own, transparency recognizes that unfamiliarity with the 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, or opportunity gaps in their education can orient themselves and feel invited to engage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40e1FPaJowg&t=1s

Transparency also helps authors 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.

Backward Design

One approach to ensuring alignment is backward design, created by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1998). It means starting with learning outcomes – what you want students to know and be able to do at the end of a course – and developing the curriculum from there.

Words like “outcomes” and “objectives” and “deliverables” can make our interactions with students sound uncomfortably like transactions between a manager and worker, or a company and a customer. But, consider a metaphor used by Mary Burgess, Executive Director of BC Campus, to describe the student perspective. She says that learning design work is like air travel: I want to buy a ticket to Portland and end up in Portland. I don’t want to buy a ticket to Portland and end up in Toronto. And I really don’t want to buy a blank ticket that comes with a vague promise that it’s about the journey.

Language like outcomes and deliverables explain why students should read and engage. Everything that students do in a textbook should enable them to achieve the learning outcomes. This is because if you start with your outcomes, you can use backward design to align all of your content to what you want students to know and do. Follow these steps:

1. What are your course outcomes? That is, what should students know or be able to do by the end of the curriculum?
2. What content and practice opportunities do students need in order to succeed at these course outcomes?
3. How will your open curriculum help students and instructors meet the overarching goals of the course?

As you can see, if you take this approach, you need to start with a clear idea of your course outcomes. The book content and activities work together to enable students to achieve the course outcomes. This approach is not content-centered, but learner-centered, which is why it supports our Learner Focus criteria for success.

Course Level Outcomes

Course level outcomes name what students will know or be able to do by the end of the quarter. They are specific to the course, describe transformative learning, and are demonstrable. We recommend 4 to 6 course level outcomes for your curriculum.

Course outcomes are broad, ambitious statements, so students likely won’t demonstrate that they’ve met them by completing a single activity or assignment. However, future instructors should be able to design assessments that give students opportunities to show that they are making progress towards the course outcomes.

For this project, we usually aren’t writing entirely new course level outcomes since Oregon’s Common Course Numbering initiative has led to statewide outcomes for high-enrollment courses. 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, you can look at Resources for Common Course Numbering [Website] from the Higher Education Coordinating Commission for more information.

Having agreed-upon statewide course level outcomes means that you are writing a textbook that is VERY sharable in Oregon. When you design for these outcomes you are addressing the content that all other Oregon instructors need to cover. At the same time, because your textbook is openly licensed, that means that other instructors have permission to customize it so that it fits how they like to teach the content.

Draft Course Level Learning Outcomes

One of your tasks for this unit is to add 4 to 6 course learning outcomes to your {Course #} About This Book document, under the header provided in the template. This section explains how to do that.

First, revisit the third tab of your {Course #} Background Scan to see what the Research Consultant has already found out about learning outcomes for your course. If your course has gone through the Common Course Numbering or Major Transfer Map process then those are the outcomes included. Copy and paste the statewide outcomes to your {Course #} About This Book document, if they aren’t already there.

If statewide outcomes for your course don’t exist, then your background scan includes representative course learning outcomes used at public higher education institutions in Oregon that you can use as a starting point. Choose 4 to 6 outcomes that will enable each member of the author team to use the curriculum you’re designing to teach the course at their own institution. Use the space under the Course Outcomes header in your {Course #} About This Book document to draft your list.

Even if you have a list of statewide or institutional outcomes to work with, you may want to write at least one additional course level learning outcome that connects to your curriculum’s equity goals. Adding course level outcomes that directly support your vision for your curriculum will strengthen its alignment with your values and push Oregon programs to consider diverse ways that programs are designing pathways for students. Later, when you write the front and back matter for your book, you’ll have an opportunity to explain your choices.

Draft new course level learning outcomes in your {Course #} About This Book document to discuss in your team meeting for this unit. 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 that 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).

Licenses and Attributions for Alignment in Curriculum Design

Open content, original

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

Open content, shared previously

“Backward Design” is adapted from Designing for Open Pedagogy by Mary Burgess, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0, and One Approach to Redesigning Your Course by Amy Hofer for Open Oregon Educational Resources, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

“Transparency for Equity-Minded Course Design” is adapted from Course and Textbook Development Pathway by Veronica Vold and licensed under CC BY 4.0.

References