Preparing for a new semester requires considerable reflection and involves both pedagogical and practical considerations. Keep in mind that this is an iterative process; as you work with each new cohort of students and observe their learning and engagement, you will refine and adjust your designs and/or instructional approach. The sustainable design processes outlined in this guide will set you up to do that. 

As you approach your in-person course and navigate through the design process, your choices should be guided by this question:

What type of experiences do you want students to have while they are mastering course content through each learning activity, assignment, discussion, and assessment?

1. Interaction with each other (student-to-student)

2. Interaction with you (student-to-instructor)

3. Interaction with the content (student-to-content)

Ideally, you’ll create a consistent combination of these types of experiences throughout the duration of the course. To ensure consistency, it will be important to identify which type of experience accompanies every learning exercise, assignment, discussion, and assessment and adapt your plans accordingly. 

In addition, your choices will be guided by your course size and format, as well as the primary learning focus of your course, such as Skills & Processes, Content Mastery, or Experiential or Project-Based, as divided in this table. 

When planning your course, it can be tempting to focus most on the lectures, activities, and assessments you conduct during your in-class sessions. However, intentional decisions about what and how you would like students to engage with your course materials both in and out of class time is an important part of reflective course design. This is especially true when aiming to support metacognition, content mastery, and active student learning. Your approach will vary depending on your content and the typical student population that takes your course. 

Further, documenting your required out-of-class learning will ensure you are compliant with Credit Hour Guidance. For each credit associated with a course, the course must include the appropriate amount of instructional time and supplementary assignment time associated with a single credit. Some of the out-of-class learning expectations you document will be your “supplementary assignment time”, such as visits to museums, attendance at relevant events, collaborating on a group project, or other structured assignments. Other out-of-class expectations may be the independent learning activities students are responsible for in order to achieve course outcomes, such as brainstorming for a paper, studying for a quiz, or reflecting on the key concepts discussed during an in-class session. 

Whether you are documenting for credit compliance or articulating your expectations for students, incorporating explicit out-of-class learning will help you design effective in-class sessions. Further, you will empower students to meet the level of academic rigor we expect by making effective learning strategies more explicit. You will be able to make these expectations clear in the How to Take this Class section of the Live Syllabus Template.

Once you’ve determined what these out-of-class learning activities are, communicate these expectations:

• With appropriate documentation in the syllabus (Select a Course Plan Template for a quick start on this process!)

• Through clear assignment instructions

• During in-class discussions about what students need to do to succeed in your course

Faculty Example: Duncan Smith, Esteban Mazzoni and Barbara Akum’s Principles of Biology course provides this lesson plan of activities within their Brightspace content as a strategy to improve student learning.

For your own planning, you may find the example course rhythm tables helpful as you plan out weekly learning, including content topics, learning expectations, assignments, and class activities. These tables are meant to illustrate sample planning sequences, but you can customize them to meet the needs of your particular course. 

A course plan provides a process for reflective pedagogical and technological course design. If you are updating an existing course, compare your current curriculum with the key points in your Course Plan Template to identify what aspects of  your course would benefit from reevaluation. This narrative of all the materials and interactions that will take place during the course is reflected in both the Live Syllabus Template, which is student-facing, and the Course Plan Template, which is used for planning by the instructor and any other course or design team members. 

Use the table from the Getting Started section above to determine which Course Plan Template fits your course’s learning format:

• Skills & Processes Course Plan Template

• Content Mastery Course Plan Template

• Experiential or Project-Based Course Plan Template

For the benefit of new instructors, we have created some in-depth guides to explore teaching strategies that promote active learning. You can use these resources to inform your decision making process when mapping out your course plan.

• Active Learning and Tools Guide

The course plan template breaks down your weekly outcomes into Units → Lessons. The benefit to thinking about your courses in this way is twofold. The divisions in this format are derived from the backward design process, which has instructors begin from what mastery of the week’s topic looks like, the learning objectives, and work backwards from that goal to articulate the learning activities, both in and out of the classroom, that will help students reach those objectives. In addition, should you choose to build any/all course materials in the course Brightspace, the Content tool uses Units → Lessons structure so your weekly plans can seamlessly be created/added to the course Content tool.

Both new and experienced instructors will save time and create a better end result by following the sustainable process outlined here for two reasons: 

• From a practical perspective, learning spaces, whether your in-person classroom or the technological tools you use to support it, are dynamic and constantly evolving. Creating your course content directly in tools that may change in either appearance or availability may be work that will need to be re-done. If you follow sustainable processes, it will ensure you are not put in the position of having to “start from scratch” when conditions such as technology platforms or the structure of course offerings change (such as for length of semesters or modality of delivery). 

• From a pedagogical perspective, crafting an overall course plan, also called course mapping, is a tried and true approach to ensuring quality course design. This approach will give you a bird's-eye perspective of your lessons and activities, and enable you to implement consistency of experience across the entire course and identify expert blindspots. Particularly when teaching a course that you have done many times over, participating in this reflective teaching practice ensures that you are evaluating student outcomes and accomplishing your goals as an educator. 

Effective assessments not only serve as a mechanism for assigning grades, but, perhaps more importantly, as a tool for providing students feedback on their learning. Research has shown that students perform better when frequent low-stakes assessments are built into a course. Only requiring a few high-stakes, summative assessments, like a midterm and final exam, provides less information to students about how they are doing and offers less opportunities for them to correct their learning strategies. Frequent low-stakes, formative assessments provide an important feedback loop between students and the instructor. 

Below is a list of common assessment strategies and the technological tools you can use to facilitate them. 

Knowledge Checks, including Polls & Quizzes

Description: Getting Started with Knowledge Checks Students are given a set of multiple-choice / true-false / matching style questions to enforce content students are working toward mastering. 

Tools: Comparison of Synchronous Engagement Tools

Interaction: Student-to-content

Delivery: Out-of-Class or In-Class

Exams

Description: Students complete and submit multiple choice / true-false / matching / short answer / essay questions to demonstrate content mastery.

Tools: Comparison of high stakes assessments

Comparison of low stakes assessments

Interaction: Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

Delivery: Out-of-Class or In-Class 

(Note: We recommend avoiding giving high stakes synchronous or asynchronous exams that are comprised primarily or exclusively of objective answers to maintain academic integrity)

Essays/Papers

Description: Students write and submit work in accordance with instructor directions and specifications in order to demonstrate content mastery. 

Tools: Comparison of assignment tools

Comparison of peer review tools

Student guide for Google Assignments

Interaction: Student-to-instructor, student-to-content, or student-to-student (if peer review)

Delivery: Out-of-Class

Individual/Group Projects

Description: Students individually or collaboratively work on a components associated with a project designed to enable students to achieve content mastery

Tools: Comparison of assignment tools

Flipped Student Presentations Guide

Student Guide for Creating and Editing Short Videos or Podcasts

Student Guide for Creating Short Videos

Interaction: Student-to-student, Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

Delivery: Out-of-Class or In-Class

Discussion (includes social annotation, chat, and other asynchronous tools)

Description: Enables conversations about texts, images, videos, or podcasts to take place in the texts, images, videos, or podcasts themselves; particularly effective for teaching close reading skills. Students can mark up assigned materials on their own, and instructors can “embed” question(s) for students to address while they complete their annotation. During the process, students can view and respond to the commentary from their peers and instructor. 

Tools: Comparison of Discussion Tools  (With the exception of Brightspace Discussions, these tools can also be used synchronously in a live class)

Interaction: Student-to-student, student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  Delivery: Out-of-Class or In-Class

Make a copy of the Live Syllabus Template. We recommend working in Google Docs and using this formatted template for accessibility and flexibility purposes. If you are reviewing a course you have previously taught, compare your existing syllabus with the live template. In addition, before publishing your syllabus, review the CAS Syllabus checklist to ensure you are following the CAS guidelines. 

You’ll see that the majority of the information you need to initially provide in the syllabus is associated with general administrative information for the course. You can start filling these fields in from existing documentation, such as syllabi and course proposals, and then refine the information later, after you have completed your weekly plan.

Some additional items to keep in mind as you generate or revise your syllabus are:

• In creating syllabi that support learning for all students, be explicit about your expectations. As instructors, we can take steps to make the hidden curriculum we take for granted, like what office hours are for or how to successfully manage a group project, visible so our students can be successful. When you can, especially for introductory courses, it is important to be clear about 1) your expectations both in and out of the classroom, 2) assignment instructions, and 3) the overall flow and structure of the course. 

• You can support student engagement during in-person components by giving students explicit assignments to prepare them for the session and having them submit preliminary evidence of their work to you beforehand

  • example: completing a reading or viewing assignment and doing a knowledge check, summary or outline submission, or a learning journal entry before an in-class discussion.

• In crafting the plan for each week, you will ideally create learning experiences and assignments that provide a blend of student-to-student, student-to-instructor, and student-to-content experiences.  

When you get to the Weekly Planning section of the Live Syllabus document, you’ll see that for each week you should provide the following:

• Week #

• Topic

• Learning Objectives

• Learning Exercises & Assignments

• Instructional Materials (Required & Supplemental)

The order of these elements is intentional: it automatically engages you in the results-oriented backward design process. You will begin by articulating what your students need to learn about the week’s topic (the Learning Objectives) and what evidence is needed to determine if students have achieved those learning objectives. Then design the ways they will engage with those materials and demonstrate their learning (the Learning Exercises & Assignments), and finally collect all of the materials they will need to use to do that learning (the Instructional Materials). 

At this point you will want to move from the Syllabus to the Course Plan Template and use backward design to fill in the unit structure for your course. In this template, the Unit Overview section is the highest level of organization. Units can be segmented by weeks, progressions, textbook chapters, etc. This segmentation really depends on the structure of your course. The most common segmentation is by week. The Activity Overview portion of that section contains a general statement about how students will engage with the instructional materials over the course of the unit.

The subunit sections are often where the real work of backward design comes into play. Here instructors have the opportunity to unpack the Activity Overview into the individual steps that students will need to take both in and out of class to reach the unit’s/week’s learning goals. Separating activities out into clearly articulated subunits allows instructors to ensure they have been explicit in their assignments and expectations of student learning. 

As you complete the units in the Course Plan template, you will move the student-facing information (assignments, materials, instructions) over to your Live Syllabus document and create any other supplemental planning or instructional materials you may need, such as question banks for quizzes.

Office hours are an opportunity to connect with students 1:1 while addressing misconceptions about course content and the process of learning. As you would with your other course expectations, it is important to explain the purpose of office hours to students. Some of the common reasons students do not take advantage of office hours is they do not understand the purpose or feel intimidated by the prospect of seeking out their professor in that way. Calling them something like “Student Hours” rather than “Office Hours” can also encourage use of this valuable time.

At the beginning of your course, in addition to discussing what students need to do independently to succeed in your course, spend some time normalizing the use of office hours by  encouraging them to attend and explaining potential goals students can have when coming to you for office hour support. To further encourage student connection, exercise flexibility by offering both in-person and virtual office hour options. It’s recommended to host virtual office hours through Zoom. The Waiting Room feature will help to ensure that your one-on-one conversations are private. 

You can create appointments in Zoom. You may also consider using your Google Calendar to create an appointment schedule for your office hours. See our Appointment Slots in Google Calendar Guide for instructions.

When your Course Plan template is complete and you are ready to start building in your course site platform, you may be surprised by how many different elements you have amassed. The amount of information involved in a well-planned online course makes the final step in the sustainable, high-quality design process one of the most crucial: creating and maintaining a well-structured library of course materials. 

We strongly recommend storing all course materials in Google Drive. Here are some reasons why you might want to do this, in addition to simply keeping track of what you’re using in the course: 

• Many learning materials are interdependent, so if you need to make a change or swap out a resource, you’ll need to make a change in assignments linked to it.  Having them identified and organized together makes that task easier and more accurate.

• Keep assessment questions and assignment prompts in a spreadsheet and not only in the platform you’re using, whether it’s Brightspace, Gradescope, Poll Everywhere, or other tools. Keeping a spreadsheet of questions or prompts will allow you to move between tools or try out new ones, in addition to allowing you to share and manage question pools more easily. We recommend you NEVER build an assessment or assignment directly in a platform. 

• To help control assessments for integrity and differentiation (ie, to make them less susceptible to student cheating), make sure that you’re not using the same exams over and over and that you have a record of all of the different versions you’ve used. 

• Keeping a google doc with the text you paste into content areas in Brightspace or another learning platform can make it easier for you to make major adaptations to the structure of a course, say to accommodate a change in textbooks or creating a Jterm or summer session course from a spring or fall semester offering. You will be able to make all of the changes to related materials and move around chunks of content without needing to click in and out of content areas. 

Additional tips include: 

• Creating an organized folder structure (e.g., COURSE MATERIALS 2020 > READINGS > ASSIGNMENTS > VIDEOS > QUIZZES, etc.)

• Creating and sticking to document naming conventions (e.g., COURSE_NAME_SEMESTER_YEAR_Syllabus)

• Keeping an Archive folder for older or discarded versions of assignments or syllabi.

• L. Dee Fink's A Self Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant Learning  

• CAST’s Universal Design for Learning Guidelines

• Decoding the Disciplines Project

• Saundra Yancy McGuire & Stephanie McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn.

• Peter C. Brown’s Make it stick : The Science of Successful Learning

• Arts & Science Office of Educational Technology’s Metacognition, or, Making Students Partners in their Learning

• Stephen Brookfield's Discussion as a Way of Teaching

• James M. Lang’s Small teaching : Everyday lessons from the science of learning

NYU Faculty have free access to The Chronicle of Higher Education and other education newspapers. For small bite insights into current conversations about college teaching, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Teaching Newsletter provides weekly discussions about emerging pedagogical and other classroom issues. The Small Changes in Teaching series is a good starting point.