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You may be familiar with student learning outcomes, also sometimes called learning objectives or course goals. Your course may have preset outcomes already determined, or you might need to identify outcomes. In either case, you want to make sure you have a set of student learning outcomes that are accurate and reflect the purpose of the course. Good student learning outcomes are observable and measurable — so you can observe student work and measure whether it meets the goals of the course. Outcomes might address content knowledge, skills, or even dispositions that you intend students to acquire. For a guide to writing effective student learning outcomes, check out the OAI+ article on assessment methods.

Imagine that a large box arrives at your house. It’s full of parts to assemble but has no instructions and no pictures of the final object — so you are stuck trying to make sense of all the parts without understanding the end goal. This is how students often feel when they enter a course without student learning outcomes or clear goals.

Once you’ve identified the outcomes for your course, they form the foundation, blueprint, or roadmap that everyone in the course is working toward. As you design or revise your course, keep coming back to these outcomes to ensure your planned assessments, assignments, learning activities, and teaching strategies align with your intended learning outcomes.

Think back to that mysterious box that arrived at your house. What if the box had instructions, but they didn’t match the parts? What if parts were missing or the instructions skipped big steps?

This is analogous to what happens when assigned work doesn’t align with the course goals or when assessments don’t match what has been taught in the class. It’s difficult for students to understand why the work is necessary or relevant or how their assessments reflect what they are learning.

This article uses assessments and assignments interchangeably as ways to externalize student learning, to better observe and measure it.

Some assessments are intended to help you and students perceive how much progress you’ve all made toward meeting the course goals. Other assessments are meant to measure whether students are ready to move on to the next stage, whether that’s the next topic in your course or another course altogether. Not all assessments need to be graded. Some can be used as practice that helps you adjust your expectations and helps students know what to focus on as they progress through the course.

On assessments meant to serve as learning tools for future work, it’s often helpful to give students opportunities for peer review, self-reflection, and suggestions rather than a letter or number grade. Research shows that grades are often demotivating for students and can be confusing when students try to improve their grade in future assignments. While we often look at grades as inevitable and ubiquitous, they are relatively new as a standard practice in higher education (Schinske & Tanner, 2014).

When asking students to complete large assessments such as term papers, presentations, group projects, lab experiments, final exams, or research studies, it’s helpful to break these assignments into smaller tasks that “scaffold” the work and support the final product.

Another important aspect of scaffolding is ensuring continuity between synchronous and asynchronous aspects of the class. For example, if students are assigned readings and discussions to complete on their own time, class time should relate to those readings and discussions. Maybe that means scheduling time for Q&A about the asynchronous work before moving on to new material, or providing the new material in advance of the class session so students are ready to discuss it in real time.

One of the most common mistakes in course design is assuming the material is the course. Rather, the material is merely one tool of the course. The learning experiences, relationships, and teaching strategies you plan should align with your course goals and students needs. “Those who do the work do the learning” (Doyle, 2011) — so the more students have opportunities to interact with the course materials, their peers, and you, the better. When considering what activities to design for your course, ask yourself what students can do to connect with the course skills, dispositions, and concepts.

Whether you use feedback from last term’s students or suggestions from this term’s students, inviting your students to give design input will do a lot to help the course run smoothly.

• • Student input encourages student motivation, participation, and agency.
  • Course co-creation helps to meet student needs by encouraging a diversity of ideas and choices.

Even before you meet your students, it’s important to think about how you can engage with them, give them feedback, and check in with them regularly. Building community and a sense of instructor presence goes a long way in helping students feel supported and part of a learning community.

Despite all the planning you’ve done, each time you teach a course you and your students will have different needs and outcomes. It can be helpful to keep a running log of changes you’d like to make or strategies that worked well. Then when you prepare to teach the course again, you have an idea of where to focus your efforts. An OAI course consultation or a student-centered course review can also give you feedback and ideas to continue refining your course.

Imagine this: You visit your local market to pick up some peanut butter, but it’s no longer where you expect it. You ask for help, but still can’t find it. You give up and leave the store with no peanut butter. A disorganized online course is like the rearranged market. When students log in and can’t easily find what they need to complete a task or lesson, their frustration often leads to giving up.

An organized course creates a pattern of expectations, resulting in routines that are easy for students to follow. Instructional designers often refer to these routines and patterns as the “learning cycle.” A clear learning cycle allows students to anticipate their learning and plan ahead. A consistent course structure and communication pattern will lower students’ anxiety and keep them focused on learning.

The “three Cs” of good course organization are:

• Clarity
• Consistency
• Communication

In a face-to-face course, you can go over the syllabus to answer questions and verbally roadmap the course. In a digital environment, roadmapping must be explicit in the course design and instructional copy. When a student spends time looking for instructions, content, due dates, etc., their anxiety level increases and becomes a cognitive burden. Good organization reduces that burden.

The goal is to make it easy for students to know:

• Expected learning outcomes
• What tasks are required each day/week and how to find and complete them
• When and how they’ll interact with you
• When and how they’ll interact with other students
• What they’ll be graded on and how to prepare for assessments

The most common way to provide this organization is with weekly modules that group course materials and present them in chronological sequence. A module should have links to everything needed for each lesson. Coursework that’s one click away lets students focus on learning rather than finding materials.

It’s extremely helpful if your department or program agrees on some conventions for how to organize courses, so don’t hesitate to consult with your colleagues.

Even in the best circumstances, students have busy lives. Many need to schedule their Internet access in advance; almost all will need to schedule their studies around work and/or childcare. This means students quickly look for coursework deadlines. Among the most helpful things you can do is establish a regular pattern of study and activity completion, so students can create a schedule at the beginning of the term.

For example, a common pattern for courses with one synchronous session per week is to have all homework due the day before the live session. Within a department these days can be staggered for all required courses.

Coursework patterns can also support a constructivist learning cycle. These follow a basic pattern (with variations):

Activation: Connect each topic to something students already know, then get them curious about aspects of it they don’t know.

Demonstration: Show students why/how this topic is relevant in the world.

Application: Let students practice using each concept or skill, with feedback.

Integration: Help students remember this lesson by reflecting on and discussing it.

This pattern has many variations, depending whether learning outcomes are more experiential, inquiry-based, or modeled on apprenticeship to demonstrate, coach, and support independent skill-building.

A good rule of thumb is that people can pay attention for 20 to 30 minutes before they need to process and connect with the new information. Active learning can take many forms. Students need to process new ideas and skills by practicing them, not just absorbing them. A handy constructivist motto to remember: “Telling isn’t teaching, and listening isn’t learning.”

For every major skill in your pyramid, think about how students can practice that skill fairly soon after it’s introduced. For information retention, give a brief review quiz. For critical thinking or skill performance, ask students how they would choose among different approaches to solving a problem. For a creative process, have students make a low-stakes artifact and share it. This does not mean overloading students with challenging assignments — these should be fun, low-stakes activities.

Once you’ve defined your key learning outcome and “chunked” them into 20 to 30 minute lessons with a low-stakes activity for each, the next step is to put them in a logical sequence. Beware the temptation to follow textbook-chapter sequencing. Books are organized by the logical flow of domain knowledge, not the order in which students learn intellectual skill-building. Instead, focus on your learning outcomes and what students need to practice for each outcome.

1. Look at your list of learning outcomes. Now imagine a pyramid with those outcomes at the top and decide what skills students will need to attain them (conceptual, procedural, behavioral, affective or physical skills).
2. List those skills at the base of the pyramid and consider whether they should be learned in a particular order. Decide the best way for students to:
   • Observe this skill demonstrated.
   • Practice and refine this skill with feedback.
   • Self-correct and improve this skill independently.
3. Think of all the possible modes students could work in to gain each skill. If you normally assign multiple essays or exams, consider other ways students might demonstrate needed skills.

Research shows that without regular mini-challenges, students don’t learn as well. They need to use each “chunk” of new knowledge/skill to remember it and be able to apply it.
But there’s a problem with this “think and do” learning pattern: Even low-stakes assignments can intimidate, overwhelm, or annoy students. How do you make this pattern transcend “busywork” and become meaningful?

The best way is to let students choose their own “think and do” activity:

• Students with writing or homework anxiety often benefit from review quizzes with multiple attempts allowed. Such quizzes are learning tools, not assessment tools.
• Students with quiz anxiety often prefer to create a mini-artifact or write a discussion/journal post to activate their learning. You can assess these on a done/not done basis or with a simple rubric.

Ideally, your course content will have options for content delivery. This can be as simple as making sure students know their computer operating system offers text-to-voice delivery for PDF content. When possible, provide accessible audiovisual options for articles, so students can choose to get information in the way that works best for them.