Course Development Procedures

In preparation of building your course, consider the following steps:

Begin by identifying tailored Learning Outcomes for each week of the course in accordance with the course description published in the course catalog.
For each outcome, there should be a measurable assessment of student understanding and comprehension of that outcome. For example, if ensuring student understanding of course terminology, then consider building a Check your Understanding short quiz in that unit.
Delve further into course material and student engagement within your lesson by designing course Learning Activities. For example, in lieu of face-to-face class interaction, build a discussion forum for active student exchange of ideas on the course materials. Carefully balance instruction and activities for the learner.
Pull the course content together by supplying assigned reading, resources, videos, recorded lectures, etc. to thoroughly provide varied and dynamic materials for greater student understanding. (e.g., Importing content from other courses)

Theories of Knowledge, Learning styles and other helpful tools to create your course

Bloom’s Taxonomy – The Foundation

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues published the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain). When teaching thinking skills, most educators have found Bloom’s taxonomy a useful tool for developing learning outcomes, as well as framing questions and building exercises:

Knowledge:

The ability to recall specific information, including facts, terminology, conventions, criteria, methodology, principles, and theories. Related actions are: to define, recall, and recognize.

Comprehension:

The ability to understand the literal meaning of any communication. Comprehension includes the abilities to translate, transform, and state in one’s own words. Specifically, Bloom defined three types of comprehension:

- - - Translation: taking what is being communicated and putting it into another form.
    - Interpretation: reordering the ideas into a new configuration.
    - Extrapolation: making estimates or predictions from a previous communication.

Application:

Taking a principle or process previously learned and applying it to a new situation. Related verbs include: to generalize, relate, organize, and classify.

Analysis:

Breaking material into its separate components, deducing their relationships, and understanding their pattern of organization. Related verbs include: to distinguish, detect, discriminate, and contrast.

Synthesis:

The creative process of putting parts or elements together into a new whole. Related verbs include: to produce, modify, restructure, originate, and derive.

Evaluation:

The process of making value judgments about ideas, solutions, methods, etc. Related verbs include: to evaluate, judge, appraise, rate, and weigh.

Anderson & Krathwohl

At the start of this century, a pair of researchers – Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl (who originally worked with Bloom) – reexamined Bloom’s hierarchy and provided a revision to the longstanding taxonomy. While the parallels are strong, their model differs slightly and better reflects modern thinking on how learning is demonstrated. The list below provides their revised hierarchical stages:

Remember:

Recognizing or recalling knowledge from memory. Memory is a tool that produces definitions, lists, facts, recitation or recall of information.

Understand:

Determining meaning from a variety of sources (text, spoken word, graphic representation, multimedia, etc.). It involves interpretation, classification, summarization, inference, comparison.

Apply:

Putting to use an established procedure or model such as in a simulation, a demonstration, or other implementation of a procedure.

Analyze:

Deconstructing a concept or an item into smaller components in an attempt to understand interrelation of the pieces to the whole as well as the overall structure of the piece. The process allows learners to differentiate among components.

Evaluate:

Employing critique that aligns with established criteria and standards. Demonstrates the ability to make sound and reasoned judgments within the appropriate framework for a concept.

Create:

Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing. Creating requires users to put parts together in a new way or synthesize parts into something new and different, a new form or product.

What they have done, aside from establishing a more active framework in the verbiage for their taxonomy, is to reframe the hierarchy in light of more recent research.

Comparison Chart Bloom versus Anderson and Krathwohl (2001)

ADDIE Model: Assign, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation

Building the IFSS Curriculum Framework Part One: Blueprint for Course Development — IFPTIOne of the foundational processes used by training developers in the instructional systems design (ISD) field is the ADDIE model, which outlines the five steps for developing effective training. The chronological steps in the model are: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.

Image highlighting curriculum framework process

Create a Blueprint

The graphic below is a layout or "blueprint" to guide the development of your course. The Course Blueprint consists of four elements which include:

Course Description

Faculty should utilize the most recent version of the course description as published in the Immaculata Course Catalog published on the Immaculata.edu website.

General Course Goals

What are the overarching goals of your course?

Performance Outcomes

Each module will have outcomes that you desire for your students to achieve. These should be measurable.

Learning Objectives (Inputs)

These are the assignments that students will need to complete to demonstrate proficiency in learning the material.

Assessment Activities (Outputs)

These measurement tools, designed in the performance outcomes, are delivered using the learning objectives and the resulting measurements resulting from the inputs are those assessment outputs.

The sample Course Blueprint below will assist you in visualizing how you can design your own course blueprint.

VARK: Visual, Aural, Verbal [reading/writing], and Kinesthetic

Learning Styles:

Descriptions of learning styles vary. One of the better known collections of learning styles looks at sensory processing, remembered through the acronym “VARK,” which stands for visual, aural, verbal [reading/writing], and kinesthetic. Other models have more to do with students’ learning processes and knowledge organization skills, which can run through the following continuum (identified by Felder and Silverman in their Index of Learning Styles): active-reflective, sensing-intuitive, verbal-visual, and sequential-global.

The bottom line?

Class activities that allow multiple reinforcements of concepts (from homework to lecture to discussion to activity to project to presentation, for instance) have the best chance of concepts being retained by learners in a meaningful way. The more learners perceive “control” over content, the more they – eventually – truly own that knowledge.

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