Designing Effective
Courses
Structure & Organization
How a course is structured is important. Organizational clarity creates ease for students by minimizing frustration, maximizing predictability, and reducing cognitive load. This page provides instructors with resources to develop learning goals and organize the course and provide structures for students to learn and succeed in your course.
Assessment & Feedback
Assessments, when designed effectively, provide great opportunities for students to engage in deep learning and for the instructor to gauge understanding, provide feedback, and assign grades. This page provides resources for understanding the the different types of assessments, selecting assessment strategies that align with your learning objectives, and considering academic integrity.
Active Learning
This page provides instructors and TAs with resources for understanding the research background of active learning, selecting active learning strategies that align with your learning objectives in any teaching modality, and designing effective and equitable collaborative activities and group work.
Syllabus Template
This page provides several of our favorite syllabus design resources, as well as a syllabus template with sample language that you can adapt for your courses.
Need more help?
The TLC offers a number of opportunities for instructors to get support with course design, redesign, and development beyond the resources in these pages.
- Project REAL provides a learning community for faculty to redesign a course in a group setting over five weeks in the summer.
- Through Global Classrooms, faculty can adapt an existing course to integrate a Virtual Exchange/Collaborative Online International Learning (VE/COIL) component.
- Graduate students can participate in the Course Design and Delivery certificate program.
- The are numerous opportunities for online course design and development for individuals and groups of instructors with the support of instructional designers.
- You can self-enroll in Integrated Course Design for Remote Instruction. The course blends pedagogical practices with practical tutorials for designing digital assignments and assessments, creating lecture videos, working more effectively in Canvas, and incorporating other instructional tools to help you create effective online courses.
- Schedule a consultation for individual support.