Course Design and Planning

A successful course depends on the planning that precedes it. The articles and links in this section serve as planning guides. They provide instructions for developing a new or existing course and for creating a syllabus.

Course Design Tutorial (Carleton College)
This site provides a step-by-step approach to course planning starting with the development of goals for student learning and moving on to teaching strategies, assessment of student learning, and the syllabus. Many of the examples are drawn from the geosciences, but the principles are relevant to all disciplines.

Designing Your Course (Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence)
Resources from the Cornell Center for Teaching Excellence, including a downloadable syllabus template, Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Outcomes, a course materials checklist, and reflective course planning questions.

The Value of Learning Objectives (CMU Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence)
This white paper from Carnegie Mellon's teaching center offers a research basis for the importance of specifying learning objectives.

Transparency in Teaching and Learning (TILT) (UNLV Instructional Development and Research)
Transparent teaching methods help students understand how and why they are learning course content in particular ways. This site also provides examples and resources for transparent teaching. 

Radical Course Revision: A Case Study
This essay in The National Teaching and Learning Forum focuses on how to revise a course through rigorous, critical reflection on teaching, the same kind of systematic critical reflection that is often applied to research. This article includes four steps for successful “radical revision” of an existing course.