Building Course Goals

Ball in Goal Understanding by Design begins with the central idea that to develop a good course, you need to start with the end in mind. Where do you want your students to be at the end of the course? What will they be able to do? What will they understand? Thinking about these questions at the beginning and establishing clear outcomes for your course will help keep your course development on track and focused.

It's tempting to think, "Well, fine, I'll jot down a couple of goals and let's get on with this." But establishing good goals takes a bit more depth and thought than that. Although we don't want to get bogged down in this for days, taking an hour or so to really think through your course goals will save you time in developing your course and result in a much better and more complete course. The goal of this Design section is for you to establish excellent goals for your online course. You can modify and change these as you move forward, but starting your course design with a set of solid goals will give you the confidence you need to know that your course is on track.

Step 1: Understanding by Design

So let's start. To get a better idea of the overall picture of Understanding by Design and how it relates to course goals, let's take a look at this PowerPoint by Scott Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Take some time to work through it, and pay special attention to slides 17-25, which go into detail on course outcomes and goals. As you view this, start imagining what goals you'll have for your course. When you're done with the PowerPoint, come back to this webpage.

Understanding by Design

Step 2: What's the End, Part A

Let's start building goals for your course. With your students, levels, and time frame in mind, start brainstorming goals for your course. For our purposes, these can fall into essentially four different categories: Understandings; Essential Questions; Knowledge; and Skills. What major understandings will your students have at the end of the course? Are there essential, "big," questions you want them to think deeply about? What will they know? What will they be able to do when they are done with your course?

Hints...

Jotting these down on paper or informally typing them up can often help streamline this process. Also, bouncing ideas of colleagues can help as well. Don't be afraid to put down crazy ideas now. You can cull the list as you go.

Also, some courses don't lend themselves to certain categories of goals, so don't stress our and lose sleep of you can't think of goals for a particular category. For example, my Japanese languages courses are incredibly "skill-heavy," and the goals would reflect this. It's just not the nature of those courses to have lots of major, breakthrough understanding type goals. A philosophy course may be the opposite. So, when you do this activity, let the activity serve you, don't serve the activity. Write goals in categories that make sense for your course. Don't force things to fit the form.

Once you've got that done, let's move on...

Step 3: One Second...Standards

Whenever I hear the word "Standards" in reference to course design, my stomach starts getting tied into knots and I groan, but it doesn't have to be this way. Standards are incredibly useful in online course design, because they make your course marketable to a much wider audience, give your course credibility, and actually can help generate good ideas for content.

With that in mind, we'll approach the issue of aligning your course with standards in two distinct steps. I hope this will minimize the pain involved and maximize the benefit. We'll consider the first step in this week's unit, and take on the more detailed step in Unit 2.

One of our course goals will be, where feasible and practical, to align our courses with standards. The first step of this is to consider standards when creating course goals and designing our course. To this end, we've provided this link to Minnesota's State Standards for Online Courses. Take some time now to go to that page and do the following:

Scroll down to "Alignment with Academic Standards"
Find, open, and save the document that refers to your course's subject area.
Using the grade level keys on the left side of the document, briefly examine the standards that apply to your course.
Revisit the goals you created in step 2 of this process. With the standards in mind, can you add or revise some of your goals so that they would easily align with the state standards? Don't spend extensive time on this, as we'll be digging in to standards alignment more extensively in our second unit. At this point, we're just making easy adjustments where feasible.
One last consideration. There is overlap between standards and course goals, but course goals are often bigger and broader than standards. Standards will often fit inside a particular goal, and for that reason we'll address it in more detail in the next unit. Goals first, standards second, but making a quick check now can often alert us to gaps in our goals that are best filled right away.
Keep the standards document handy for the rest of the course.

Note: Some courses will not have MN State Standards. Also, for some teachers, aligning with National Standards may make more sense. In this case, you can use the National Standards collection, or another appropriate set of standards you are aware of. For example, in World Languages, the ACTFL Standards are commonly used. If you have any questions on this, please contact me.

Step 4: Creating Formal Goals

Now that you've had a chance to explore the idea of creating goals for your course and have adjusted them with regards to standards, it's time for the actual assignment.

To do this, please go to the Creating Formal Course Goals assignment. Once there, you'll download a Word document called Course Goals Template. Fill out this document. When you're done, please save the document in the following format:

lastname_first initial_u1_course_goals

For example, if your name was Mary Smith, you'd save your document as:

smith_m_u1_course_goals.

Then submit the file using the file submission procedure explained in the assignment. These instructions are repeated there for easy reference.

Good luck! Once you're done with this, go back to the main course window! Nice work!

Last modified: Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 4:42 PM