Hello, and welcome to this presentation about backward course design. My name is Dan Crawford, and I am excited to be here and sharing this with you. So upon completion of this presentation, learners will be able to describe the process for backward course design, to apply backward course design process to the current curriculum, and to identify strategies for evaluation and process improvement through backwards course design. So let's start out with this idea of course design done backwards. So you think about this, so the fundamentals of this is rather than approaching design with what needs to be taught. So think about historically, like a lot of times new faculty will approach the, you know, we assigned a course, and told like, hey, you need to teach this course, and I'll say, okay, let me start with thinking, well, what do I need to teach students? And so this is not backwards course design, it's kind of the reverse of that. But some of the reason for this, when you approach with what needs to be taught, that idea is open to interpretation and creates variability. Each faculty based on their own clinical background, and on their own teaching background, experience and expertise, are going to approach this differently. And so the idea of what needs to be taught, can create variability based on who's teaching the course. It's harder to standardize evaluation, when you have variability. It's also harder to standardize evaluation when you're approaching what needs to be taught based on skills, without knowing what the bigger picture is, on how this fits into the overall academic journey for the student. Also, when we approach it with what needs to be taught, it doesn't always support the goals and outcomes of the program. So backwards course design is an evidence based teaching strategy. And I like to think of it, I put quotes on this, on the slide here, because this is how I commonly refer to this, it's knowing where you want to go, before planning the trip. If any of us was going to go on a trip, wouldn't we first determine where we were going, before we decided the route we were going to take, the mode of transportation, hotel accommodations, activities we're going to do, like we wouldn't figure out all those without knowing where we're going first. And it's the same idea when we're talking about curriculum planning, like, we want to know where we're going, before we figure out how we're going to get there. And so backwards course design is really built upon this idea of logical design, and clear links with outcomes. So when we talk about clear links with outcomes, these are outcomes for the student. And this is starting with the end goals. And so when we're looking at applying backwards course design, we're always going to start with the end goals. And the end goals are, what do students need to know, or be able to perform, to understand what values they need to have, upon completion of the academic program. And this is guided by our program outcomes, and there's a number of factors that influence program outcomes. And I've recorded a separate presentation about designing program outcomes that I think will give you more of those details without diving into that here. But our program outcomes help to shape and describe our goals for our students. And these can also help to shape our goals for courses. Once we have these goals, though, we need to use those goals as a benchmark, and figure out how are we going to determine success. Ultimately, if we have goals, and we know how we're going to know that a student is successful in achieving those goals, this is going to start to define the structure and move us forward in our curriculum design and planning. So, how will we know that a student has met the goals in a course? Well, when we think about measurement, there are different types of evaluation for students. There are formative evaluation and summative evaluation are the primary components there. Formative evaluations are kind of measuring progress along the way, providing us with information on how students are progressing and maybe ways that we need to reinforce student learning and help towards building those final skills. And summative evaluation is that measuring at the end, saying yes or no that they have met the mark in achieving whatever the defined goal is. And so, looking at success and saying how do we know when a student has met the goal for the course will shape our summative evaluation plan. There's a lot of considerations that we need to think about as we're designing the summative evaluation, this measurement of ultimate success with acquisition of goals. And you know that there's different things, the taxonomic level, which we will talk about here shortly in more depth. The course type. Is this a clinical course? Is this a non-clinical course? How we measure, how we evaluate those clinical versus non-clinical skills might vary greatly. You consider delivery method. Are you at an institution that is a fully on campus delivery format or a fully online delivery format or some hybrid combination version in between the two? That delivery method will help to define what capabilities you have in evaluating students. You need to consider your resources. Every program has different resources and things available to faculty that can serve to support evaluation in some capacity or another. And so, as you factor all these in, you can come up with a summative evaluation plan, a plan for how are we going to know that a student is successful. And once you have, once you know what the course goal is, you have a program outcome and you know what the program outcome helps to shape the goal of the course. And the goal of the course is different than the course outcome. But once you have your goal of your course and you know how you're going to measure if a student is successfully completing that goal of that course, then you can begin to design that course. And so, when you start to begin to design the course, this is built on, you know, the knowledge and skills that are needed to succeed. You know, you know how you're going to measure success for the student. And so, you need to consider the building blocks that are needed for that student to be able to successfully achieve the course goals. And those building blocks, those building blocks now become the key concepts that shape your course learning outcomes. So we've gone from program outcomes to shaping what the course goal is and how you're going to measure that, to the building blocks that get you to that goal, and those building blocks become course learning outcomes. Oftentimes, these course learning outcomes are student-focused on what the student will be able to do upon completion of the course. If you want an example of this, you can rewind this presentation back to the learning objectives that are written in the context of, upon completion of this presentation, learners will be able to, and then list it out. In some places, they're called student learning outcomes as well. And you'll see in the literature, the student learning outcomes, sometimes you'll see it abbreviated as SLOs. So just some context there to help with, you know, it's one of those things in life where you have different languages, it means the same thing. So anyhow, these learning outcomes, once these are established, you can begin to shape what the course experience is going to be, because now you know what students are going to do or learn as a part of the course, so you can start to design what that looks like. So when we write learning outcomes, please know this is like the most rudimentary crash course you're ever going to get on writing learning outcomes. Really, you could go through multiple presentations and skills practice on writing high-quality learning outcomes. But I think that these key principles, if you haven't done this before, these key principles are going to be tremendously helpful to you. If you have done this before, this will give you a checkpoint to make sure that these are in place. So typically, learning outcomes are written with taxonomic design, so there's a hierarchy of learning, and are designed in a way that they should be appropriately leveled with the level of the educational program and the course itself. So if we think about probably the most common taxonomy when we're talking about design and learning and leveling is Bloom's taxonomy, and I'm including that here on the slide, if you're not familiar with Bloom's taxonomy. And I think that there are others that can be used. One of the taxonomies that I personally have used and I've seen some institutions use this is the taxonomy of significant learning. But there are others that can be used, but I think across institutions, Bloom's taxonomy is kind of a common language that we see in most places when it comes to leveling of learning outcomes. We need to realize that the bottom of this pyramid is lower levels of learning, and the top is highest level of learning, and something in between. If you're teaching in an undergraduate program, those low-level learnings of remembering and understanding are important. Application is going to be important as well, but oftentimes undergraduate learning does not focus as heavily on the top levels of this pyramid as graduate education. That's the purpose of graduate education. It's refined learning in a content area. And so really we should be focusing on higher levels of learning. So, you know, I think within each of these, we can think about how our students begin to apply, analyze, evaluate, and create, you know, as the fundamental building blocks of writing learning outcomes for graduate students. Doesn't mean there's never a place for lower level, but in most cases, students come in already with mastery of those lower levels of learning. And so higher levels of learning at the graduate level become our focus. Within each of these in Bloom's Taxonomy, there are certain verbs that correlate well with that level of learning. And so you'll see next to this pyramid in the, there's a description and underneath in italicized font, there are verbs and you can search online for, you know, Bloom's Taxonomy verbs. You can find long, long lists of them. But if you ever looked at learning outcomes and if you haven't heard of Bloom's Taxonomy before, you'll notice that these verbs are typically how those learning outcomes are developed and put into context. So that's a really quick crash course on Bloom's Taxonomy within an academic program. You may have different courses that focus on introducing a concept versus mastery of a concept. And you can level those in the introductory levels is gonna be, you know, lower in the pyramid or middle of the pyramid and at mastery, maybe they're in that evaluate and create phase. And so your verbs, even though maybe it's the same skill they're working on, your verbs should be leveled in a way that show how the student is progressing towards the highest levels of understanding of those concepts. So there should be a clear and linear relationship between student learning outcomes and program outcomes. If you think about how we've done this, right? Moving top down, program outcomes, then we've moved down to the course level. So those student learning outcomes or course level outcomes, there should be a linear relationship. You should be able to see how they trace back to the big picture and what we want to see in our graduates eventually upon completion of their academic program. These learning outcomes should be clear and measurable. So clear learning outcomes, easily understood what you're getting at and measurability. So the verbs that are used with Bloom's Taxonomy, for example, or the different domains that are used with Taxonomy of Significant Learning, give us pieces that should be able to be measured. We can design evaluations that then help us to measure those and assure acquisition of those skills and knowledge. But one thing to keep in mind is that when you're designing learning outcomes, you should design them in a way, clear and measurable. That is, so a lot of times, I guess I'll say it this way. I have seen over the year where learning outcomes will be written with like five different variables and six different things someone needs to master. That's not clear and that's not measurable because there's no way you can measure that many things with a couple of assignments or a couple of activities in a classroom. If there's those pieces that need to be learned, they're better to be broken down into separate learning outcomes that are clear and measurable. So keep that in mind. It is something that's important and something that I think is directly applicable when you're writing these to make sure that there's not too many moving parts in them as well, because that takes away from both clarity and measurability. So once you have these course learning outcomes or student learning outcomes, your course can begin to take shape. Building a course, it's kind of like putting a puzzle together. You have these learning outcomes that are created for the course, and now you can start to figure out how are you gonna get to that place? And some of the ways that you can think about getting that place, like this is going to help to shape your module structure, like you're doing weekly or every two weeks or you layering content and then circling back around the content. So this helps to define your structure and what's gonna work well, what needs to be included from a content perspective, right? So look how far we are into this process before we're talking about what needs to be taught. This is different. This is different than approaching a course with what needs to be taught. We're getting here well into this process before we're ever talking about what the content needs to be included in the course. The course learning outcomes shape what your learning activities should be and what your evaluation strategies are. How are you gonna measure those things? Or how are you going to teach in a way that students learn that information and retain that information, can apply that information to what needs to be done to achieve the course learning outcomes? There are some other factors that are also influenced by the outcomes. And sometimes these are non-modifiable, but the delivery method. So if you're in an institution that directly dictates what your delivery method is gonna be, if your institution says, we are not doing anything online, or if they say we are doing everything only online, you may not have much of a say in things. But if you're in an institution that allows you to mix online asynchronous learning with synchronous learning and on-campus experiences, your delivery method is shaped by your course learning outcomes. Also, like what class materials, like what books are you gonna use, or what other materials are you going to need for the class? And are there additional resources that you're going to need to successfully ensure learning in this course? So those are all factors that are related to this, but they're important to consider. Again, though, we're not talking about these until we've understood and set the framework for what needs to be learned in the course. And once we know what needs to be learned in the course, then we start to develop that structure and the activities and how we're gonna measure to make sure that, like we know how we're gonna measure the course goal and how that's gonna be successful, but how are we gonna ensure that students progress in all of these different three, four, five, six, eight learning outcomes that exist for this course, depending on the number of credit hours and the content that's there. There's a few final thoughts on backwards course design is that student mastery of outcomes and the goals are really what show the effectiveness of the course. And so this can be reflected through both formative and summative experiences. Remember, formative are the things that measure progress along the way, and summative are kind of that end point of saying, yes, mastery or acceptable levels of knowledge and skills have been achieved. You know, I think framing that, instead of framing like what pieces of information do students need to learn? Instead, we use these goals, and these goals really are how we know that a student is successful. Progressing through, you know, just making sure that there's readings and activities on certain topics. I mean, yes, there's gonna be reading and activities, but just progressing through a series that has been predefined without a set of goals never really lets us know that students have mastered the content, but with these outcomes and goals that are developed in the backwards course design process, that student mastery is really what lets us be able to say like, yes, this has gone well, and yes, this student is graduating from this program or has finished this course with the knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, and behaviors that they need to be successful in their future professional role. This student progress towards outcomes and goals, though, also helps shed light on maybe some blind spots. If students are not progressing or are not acquiring the knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, behaviors, and so on that they need to have or that we expect them to have through our logical and systematic design process, this may shed light on blind spots from our planning perspective. Like maybe we missed the mark and really need to go back and think about what are we missing and how are we going to address that to ensure that our graduates get to the place where they've achieved the predefined outcomes and goals for the program and at the course. Backwards design, again, creates more predictable outcomes. You eliminate variability and some of the other challenges that I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation. And predictable outcomes is important as an educator because you hate to put in all of this time and effort teaching and helping students navigate their academic journey if you're not going to get them where they need to be. And so predictable outcomes are really important in being able to approach the work that we do with the confidence that what we're doing is going to get students where they need to be. That allows us the freedom to be able to then pursue and develop learning strategies and activities and content from our own expertise and from our own professional knowledge to help get them where they need to be. But we can do that within the scope of knowing that what we're doing is going to be successful. And so I would encourage you to remember to start with a goal and then build the structure that is needed to achieve. And remember that this is a process of continuous improvement with built-in feedback. And so if you always have your goals and your outcomes as the mark, you can continue to refine towards those goals. And there may come a point in time where you realize you need to revise those goals. And that's not unheard of. That's actually a pretty normal thing as things progress within our disciplines. But the reality is that those can then be addressed and then you can recycle yourself back through this backwards learning and course design process to be back where you need to be. And so it's a cycle of continuous improvement, but it's a process that ensures that you have outcomes and that you're designing learning experiences and that the time that you're investing in this really gets students to a place where they can be successful in achieving their academic goals. Here's a reference that, actually this is like the, probably I would say the foundational reference around backward course design. This is super helpful. If you have the time to dive in and read this and wanna know more on the topic. However, many academic institutions you can find online have information within like their offices of teaching and learning that we'll talk about backward course design. And maybe even your own institution has resources that can help you navigate this process. So thank you for your time. And I hope this was beneficial for you.

Backward course design

Dan Crawford

learning outcomes

Bloom's Taxonomy

formative evaluations

student achievement