Unit Design

Unit design includes mapping your learning outcomes, assessment types, content delivery and learning experiences to achieve constructive alignment.

Centre for Teaching and Learning

CTL can provide support through workshops and professional learning as well as a range of resources for unit design, teaching and assessment experiences.

Unit design includes mapping your learning outcomes, assessment types, content delivery and learning experiences to achieve constructive alignment. Through the process of design teaching and learning experiences will be motivating, engaging and highly effective. The CTL can provide support through workshops and professional learning as well as a range of resources for unit design, teaching and assessment. Talk to your Director of Teaching and Learning to see what workshops they have organised and/or contact CTL to seek support and suggest professional learning experiences. You might also be interested in engaging with your colleagues through our CTL Workshops. We also provide a Foundations to University Teaching Practice to support you as a new academic at SCU.

Unit design involves planning and developing a unit of study for delivery, whether that is online, on-campus or blended. It involves making choices about what, when, where and how to teach while maintaining a focus on supporting students through the best possible learning experiences.

hand drawn illustration of tw0 hands with 10 habits written around the hands — 10 Habits of Highly Effective Unit Designers

There are a series of steps to designing or redesigning an effective unit and some ‘habits’ to being an effective unit designer.

We’ve provided guidance on each step that you can explore through the links, but first look over the graphic '10 Habits of Effective Unit Designers figure' and see which you identify with and those that perhaps you could develop more of.

Constructive Alignment

Habit number 9 is ' they align everything' Biggs and Tang called this constructive alignment and it is an essential approach when planning your unit. At the basic level this means your learning outcomes, assessment and learning experiences are aligned and each works to support the other.

'In constructive alignment, we start with the outcomes we intend students to learn, and align teaching and assessment to those outcomes. The outcome statements contain a learning activity, a verb, that students need to perform to best achieve the outcome, such as “apply expectancy-value theory of motivation”, or “explain the concept of … “. That verb says what the relevant learning activities are that the students need to undertake in order to attain the intended learning outcome. Learning is constructed by what activities the students carry out; learning is about what they do, not about what we teachers do. Likewise, assessment is about how well they achieve the intended outcomes, not about how well they report back to us what we have told them or what they have read.'

www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/constructive-alignment

Resources

The following documents can help you with unit design: