Course Design

Course Design

Course design involves planning and developing a unit of study for delivery. It involves making choices about what, when, where and how to teach while maintaining a focus on supporting the students through the best possible learning experiences. The Centre for Teaching and Learning can provide support through personalised assistance and/or self-service resources.

Biggs and Tang (2011) provides this insight on the impact we can have when we design for learning:

“Both constructivism and phenomenography agree that effective learning changes the way we see the world. The acquisition of information in itself does not bring about such a change, but the way we structure that information and think with it does. Thus, education is about conceptual change, not just the acquisition of information.” (p. 22)

Constructive Alignment

Constructive alignment is an essential approach when planning your course. At the basic level this means your learning outcomes, assessment and learning experiences are aligned and each works to support the other. Across a course each of these aspects will also align to build a cohesive and engaging course.

SCU resources for Constructive Alignment Course Mapping

The Course Curriculum Design Policy and Procedures requires all courses and units that are new or are undergoing change to map Course Learning Outcomes (CLO) and Unit Learning Outcomes (ULO) along with aligning assessment to these Unit Learning Outcomes. The tool being implement is constructive alignment to ensure that the CLOs and ULOs are aligned and that the assessments support the outcomes set by the ULOs for each unit. The following resources have been designed to accomplish this task.

Below you will find an Example Spreadsheet and instructional documents that will provide the needed guidance on how to map your Course Learning Outcomes to Unit Learning Outcomes, AQF levels and more. There are five blank templates provided for AQF 5 level courses through to AQF 10 level courses.