Before you open last semester’s syllabus and start adjusting, it's worth sitting with a more fundamental question: where do you want your students to end up? This question sits at the heart of one of the most well-supported frameworks in course design, and the answers shape how a course gets built. As the guide of your students’ online learning experience, clarity about the destination shapes how you plan the journey.

Start With the End in Mind

Most of us design courses by starting with content. What am I covering week one? What's in the textbook? What did I do last semester? The instinct makes sense, but content-first planning tends to produce courses organized around coverage rather than learning. 

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe argue in Understanding by Design (2005) that effective course design begins with the end. Before building a single module or writing a single discussion prompt, ask yourself: if you ran into one of your students years from now, what would you hope they still value, know and can do from your course? That answer guides the outcome. The readings, the assignments, the sequence of topics all exist in service of getting students there. 

Wiggins and McTighe call this "backward design," and the name is intentionally a little provocative. It surfaces the content-first assumptions that drive most course design and asks faculty to replace them with a clarity of purpose that makes subsequent design decisions easier. 

Map the Route 

Wiggins and McTighe offer a framework for making deliberate choices about course content. Some topics are worth being familiar with: useful context, background reading, supporting examples. Some are important to know and do: the core concepts and skills students need to do the work of the discipline. At the center sit enduring understandings, the transferable big ideas students should still be able to explain, apply, and build on long after they've forgotten the weekly readings.  

Mapping the route around those enduring understandings creates alignment across the whole course. When outcomes are clear, assessments can directly measure them, and learning activities can deliberately build toward them. Students are less likely to ask, ‘why are we doing this?’ when the rationale is clear in the course structure. 

References 

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.