Faculty can take a number of different approaches to course design. And, often, they take no principled approach at all. This makes sense, as most university faculty are not trained in learning theory or course design. But, course design is a process of design. And like any other design process, that means there are goals or ends which should guide and orient the design and design process.
In the case of course design, it seems reasonable to suggest that the central goal is student learning. That seems uncontroversial, even if we think there may be other goals as well. But, unfortunately, many common practices of course design do not seem to emphasize this central goal of learning. Instead, they may emphasize assessment or content coverage.
When we do make student learning our explicit and central goal in course design, I believe it helps us streamline and clarify the course design process. It can also help us make our courses fairer to all students. In what follows, I work out these ideas in more detail, emphasizing why Backward Design is key to appropriate course design.
My Journey to Backward Design
As a graduate student, when I would receive my teaching assignment for the next semester, I would go about ‘designing’ the course by finding other syllabi (both within and outside my department) and then crafting a reading list. I then used this reading list as the basis for everything else in the course such as the overall schedule and the types of assessments. Once I had that figured out, I would basically call it good until the semester started. During the semester, I would look over the reading assignment in advance of class and think about some of the big ideas. If I had said there would be some sort of reading quiz (which I would assign to punish students who didn’t complete the reading and because that is what others did) then I would quickly write the quiz. Then I would go to class and try to facilitate a discussion on the reading.
As semesters went on I did, occasionally, put more thought into things than this. I started thinking about the narrative first, and the readings second. Or I would plan activities a bit more in advance that would help students better understand the material. But, by and large, ‘course design’ for me was a matter of figuring out the readings and then writing the schedule, adding in tests or papers as they seemed to fit.
But in designing an online course, I found myself doing something different. I realized that I could not just take my face-to-face course structure and put it online because I relied so heavily on organic discussion/lecture in the classroom. So I had to ask myself: “What did I think my students were getting out of my face-to-face courses? And how can I setup my online course to accomplish the same goals?”
This way of thinking was a revelation – turns out I had accidentally stumbled upon Backward Design. Rather than starting with the content and building forward, for my online classes I would start with the end – what I wanted to students to know or be able to do at the end (of each unit and of the course) and then work my way back to the assessments, then the activities and content.
Fairness in Instructional Design
It turns out I wasn’t doing Backward Design wholly correctly, but nonetheless I did find that it helped me establish a greater match between what I expected students to do on assessments and what they actually did. On the contrary, I can remember many times in graduate school where we graduate students would commiserate over how students “couldn’t even write a thesis” or “didn’t consider an objection”. It turns out, the main problem was that although we had those expectations in our mind, we had not designed the course to provide students with the opportunities to try to do those things and receive feedback. We just expected them to do it all of a sudden on an exam or paper.
It now seems to me that we are often very unfair in our course design. We expect students to have some background knowledge that they simply don’t have; we expect students to be able to be able to display some sort of intellectual skill even though they have never had the opportunity to practice it; we expect students to be able to ‘know’ an important objection to a position simply because we told it to them once in class. All of these expectations are unfair. If we design our courses on the assumption that students will already know certain things or be able to do certain things, then we better actually know a good bit about our students so we can reasonably conclude that they should know or be able to do those things. But, often, we don’t even take the time to think about our actual students and instead just design the class a certain way because “that is how I learned it” or “that is how it has always been done”.
Moreover, if we expect to see certain skills or knowledge displayed on major assessments (mid-terms, finals, term papers, etc.) then we better ensure students have an adequate opportunity to practice those skills or gain that knowledge beforehand. But, often, we simply lecture on a subject, maybe get the input of a few students, and then ask all of the students to now critically engage with the subject. But when did they practice that? Those few students who responded to your questions did (maybe), but otherwise it was only you practicing your critical thinking, not the students.
Backward Design, Fairness, and Significant Learning
On my view, Backward Design is all about achieving a fair course design that promotes significant learning in students. The process asks us to start with what we want students to know or be able to do by the end, and then determine how we can appropriately assess that. From there we then “teach to the test” by building the rest of the course – the learning activities, the class periods, etc. – around ensuring students have ample opportunity to come to know what we expect them to know and to practice those skills we expect them to display. In this way, the course is integrated – everything complements everything else. We ensure all of the learning outcomes are actually assessed and we ensure we actually teach all of them appropriately. This makes for both fair and significant learning.
As educators, we have a moral duty to promote significant learning. Common approaches to course design generally fail to do this, we should know this, and as such we are culpable for our moral failing. As people, too, we have a moral duty to be fair. Common approaches to course design, I suggest, generally fail to be fair. I think it is reasonable that some educators do not recognize this and so I am sanguine about how culpable we are in this moral failing, but it is a moral failing all the same.
So, I think there is a moral imperative to engage in Backward Design (or at least major parts of it). But I also think that it is prudent to do so. An integrated course will result in happier students and a happier professor, as the expectations of both parties will better match and be clearer to all. This can result in less bad grading experiences since it should reduce the number of assignments where you just feel like you are banging your head against a wall.