Design Effective Course Syllabus

Designing Your Course:
Instructional Design, Course Planning,
and Developing the Syllabus
Danielle Mihram, Ph.D.
Distinguished Faculty Fellow
USC Center for Excellence in Teaching
dmihram@usc.edu

Effective Course Design
Effective course design includes the following key elements:
– (a) Determining what you want your students to learn and how you will measure
what they are learning; and
– (b) Selecting a set of activities, assignments, and materials that will help you lead
these students in their learning.
At the end of this workshop, instructors should be prepared to produce a
syllabus which:
• Articulates specific aims and objectives for a course in their field
• Identifies the relationship between course objectives, course content, and
sequencing of material
• Demonstrates how teaching effectiveness is related to student assessment
and course objectives
• States clearly defined mutual expectations
• Is clear, coherent, and comprehensive.

A Useful and Effective Syllabus …
 Requires reflection and analysis before instruction begins
 Provides a plan that conveys the logic and organization of the
course;
 Includes content, process, and product goals
 Provides students with a way to assess the whole course its
rationale, activities, policies, and scheduling
 Clarifies instructional priorities
 Defines and discusses the mutual responsibilities for the
instructor and the students in successfully meeting course goals
 Allows students to achieve high degrees of personal control over
their learning
 Is much more than a practical document, it has conceptual and
philosophical components
 Serves as a contract for learning

Overview
 Instructional design & Course planning: A systemic approach
 Planning
– Course content
– Course objectives
• The Teaching Goals Inventory
– Group work
– Learning objectives and outcomes
 Instructional strategies for student engagement and lifelong learning
-- Issues of Assessment
– Examples of assessment tools
 Identifying and assembling resources
 Syllabus checklist
 Useful resources

Instructional Design & Course Planning:
A Systemic Approach
A systemic approach to course design and planning includes five (5)
steps):
1. Analyzing:
– The situational context of your course:
• The conditions of your teaching situation
• The characteristics of the students (both student organization and
grouping)
• The resources at your disposal
2. Planning:
– The course content
– The course syllabus
• The course objectives (Formulating your course and what your students
will learn)
• The student learning outcomes

Instructional Design & Course Planning
A Systemic Approach
3. Conducting:
– Selecting appropriate and effective teaching methods
– Ongoing classroom assessment of your students’ learning
4. Assessing:
1. The course at mid-term
2. The course at the end of term
5. Reflecting on your teaching
Course design includes the following “Instructional Commonplaces”
– Learner
– Teacher
– Subject matter
– Social milieu (learning context)
– Evaluation

Analyzing
Conditions of your teaching situation:
– What official need(s) is the course to fulfill? e.g.:
– Meet the needs of the labor market?
– Satisfy the requirements of a national accreditation
organism?
– Update old content and respond to important
developments in a modern field?
– What is the course’s scope within the general program of study?
(How does your course begin? Why does it begin and end where
it does?
– The requirements of subsequent courses

Analyzing (Cont’d)
The characteristics of your students:
– Diverse academic profiles? (the courses they have taken; the content
and pedagogical organization of the previous courses)
– The degree of homogeneity of the enrolling students
– Their professional (and personal) expectations of the course
– Do the students know each other, and have they worked together
previously?
The resources at your disposal:
– Technological support [IT support] for web-based teaching, for multi-
media instruction, or for distance learning?
• Use of “smart rooms?
– Departmental (or university) support for field trips or out of class
activities?
– Honoraria for guest speakers?

Planning
Initial questions to ask when determining course content:
 What are the core scholarly, or scientific, or field-specific
findings and assumptions?
 What are the main points of arguments? What are the key bodies
of evidence?
 What is the context of the course within the larger curriculum
framework?

Planning (Cont’d)
(Initial questions to ask when determining course content:)
– Established course or new?
– Level of course (1st year? Upper division? Graduate level?)
– Is the course required or elective?
– Based on textbook and/or course pack?
– Requires activities outside of class?

Overview
 Planning
– Course content
– Learning objectives

Planning: Course Content
• Be clear about what is most worth knowing (What do students need to
know in order to derive maximum benefit from this educational
experience?)
– Describe the content that students will be required to know
– Discuss the content that you will make available to support
individual student inquiry or projects
– Provide content that might be of interest to a student who wants
to specialize in this area
• Develop a conceptual framework (theory, theme, controversial
issue) to support major ideas and topics
• Decide what topics are appropriate to what types of student
activities and assignments

Planning: Course materials
 Selecting pertinent course materials
 What do you and your students do as the course unfolds?
 About what do you lecture or discuss, or present as case studies?
What is left up to the students more generally?
 What are the key assignments or student evaluations?

Developing Course Objectives
General objectives: A course objective is a simple statement of what you
expect your students to know.
• Determining the objectives is the most important aspect of course
planning (Ask yourself, “What do students need to know in order to
derive maximum benefit from this educational experience? What
educational outcomes do I want a graduate of this course to
display?).
• Plan backwards from where you want students to end in terms of
their new knowledge, attitudes, and skills.
• List these as learning objectives (student learning outcomes) [“by
the end of the course you will be able to…”].
• Design the course in a logical and scaffolded sequence of learning
activities (reading assignments, lectures, quizzes, technology-
mediated experiences, formative assessments…)

Developing Course Objectives (Cont’d)
Course Objectives are based on various learning modes [the AVK Model
of Learning]:
• Hearing (Audio), as in lectures, seminars and discussion sections
• Seeing (Visual), as in reading and observing
• Doing (Kinesthetic), as in performance, practical and laboratory
work (which may involve taste and smell as well).
(Students learn in highly individual and complex combinations of
AVK.)
Each discipline and subject has its own “AVK” requirements, but
incorporating some A, V, and K learning into your course syllabus
not only makes for a more interesting class but, pedagogically
speaking, also helps to maximize the learning potential of each
student.

Developing Course Objectives (Cont’d)
Verbs that can be used to help construct concrete objectives for
your class.
analyze appreciate classify collaborate
compare compute contrast define
demonstrate direct derive designate
discuss display evaluate explain
identify infer integrate interpret
justify list name organize outline
report respond solicit state
synthesize
(N.B. not an exhaustive list)

Examples of Course Goals
• Discern the differences between personal writing and
writing for academic and other audiences, and show
awareness of and aptitude with voice and style
appropriate for these audiences
• Understand the relationship of the visual to the textual;
learn to "read" images
• Integrate technology in a rich and meaningful way into
the research and writing process
• Encourage students to write for a "real world" audience
beyond the classroom, if possible for campus or local
publication.

Actual Examples of Course Goal Statements
(for you to evaluate)
"Fin de sicle [sic] 1800, 1900, 2000: Three Modern Turns in Mythic
National Cultures”
… we will see how each era privileges certain classes of texts, defines the
individual, the citizen, and the human in particular ways, inscribes that
individual into the public sphere of the nation through education and other
institutions, and offers a vision of history that legitimizes or challenges the
group's identity. We will learn as scholars how to situate central texts of
culture within precise, illuminating historical, sociological, and
narratological contexts, in awareness of how ideological premises become
naturalized by disciplines, theories, and the institutions adapting them to
the service of the nation, as well as by a characteristic "order of texts"
(Chartier) -- a set of textual or artifactual "performances" that disseminated
those ideologies.
http://www.utexas.edu/courses/arens/1800/1800index.html

Principles of Psychology
The goal of this course is to provide a
broad, general introduction to
psychology, which is the scientific
study of behavior and mental
processes. (…) You should emerge
from the course with an increased
awareness of the broad range of
phenomena investigated by
psychologists and with a greater ability
to understand and critique
psychological research. Special
emphasis will be placed on applying
psychological principles to everyday
life.
http://www.southwestern.edu/~giuliant/intro.html
Fundamentals of Cognitive
Neuropsychology
In this course, we first will examine
traditionally-defined topics in cognitive
psychology (e.g., visual perception,
attention, executive function, memory,
motor control, language, consciousness),
and address: (a) how available cognitive
theories have shaped the investigation of
cognitive disorders in brain damaged
patients, and (b) how the resulting
neurological data has shaped (or reshaped)
cognitive theory. Although the focus of this
course will be on findings from studies of
cognitive disorders in patients with localized
brain damage, we will also seek converging
evidence from complementary techniques
that allow examination mind-brain
relationships in normal individuals,
including functional neuroimaging (e.g.,
PET, fMRI) and neuromonitoring (e.g.,
ERP).
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/courses/syllab
i/3480.html

Corporate Finance
This course provides an
introduction to the modern
theory and practice of
corporate finance.
Marketing Management
The goals of this course are to
introduce you to the
substantive and
procedural aspects of
marketing management,
and to sharpen your
critical thinking skills.
Strategy and Organization
The primary objective of this
course is to help you learn
to diagnose management
situations so that you will
be able to transfer this skill
to your work experience.

Course Objectives: The Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI)
Includes considerations of six major components:
1. Higher order thinking skills
2. Basic academic success skills
3. Discipline-specific knowledge and skills
4. Liberal arts and academic values
5. Work and career preparation
6. Personal development

Course objectives:
The Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI)
Found in:
Angelo, Thomas A. & K. Patricia Cross
(1993). Classroom Assessment
Techniques - A Handbook for College
Teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
(2nd ed.).

Course Objectives:
Purposes of the TGI:
• To help college teachers become more aware of what they want to
accomplish in individual courses
• To help faculty locate classroom assessment techniques they can
adapt and use to assess how well they are achieving their teaching
and learning goals among colleagues
• To provide a starting point for discussion of teaching and learning
goals among colleagues
See pp. 393-397 in:
Angelo, Thomas A. & K. Patricia Cross (1993). Classroom Assessment
Techniques - A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass (2nd ed.).
Online Access to list:
http://www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/cats/tchgoals.html
http://fm.iowa.uiowa.edu/fmi/xsl/tgi/data_entry.xsl?-db=tgi_data&-lay=Layout01&-view

Course Objectives:
Group work:
Teaching Goals Inventory and Self-scorable worksheet
(Handout)
A. Each participant:
1. Considers ONE course you are (or will) teach
2. Responds (by circling in pencil) to each item on the TGI in
relation to that particular course
B. Participants form small groups:
Explain your responses to team members
C. General discussion: what have we learned?

PHYS345 Electricity and Electronics
Course Objectives:
As a result of this course, I hope that you can better
• Realize the importance of electricity and electronics in everyday life and value its benefit
to society.
• Access the fundamental physics available for dealing with engineering problems in the
electrical domain.
• Apply selected physical concepts important in designing and using electrical and
electronic circuits.
• Analyze and solve realistic problems, use mathematical techniques effectively in their
solution, and reason accurately and objectively about the physical domain.
• Translate verbal and graphical descriptions of physical systems into appropriate
mathematical models.
• Analyze and draw valid conclusions from experimentally obtained data.
• Apply spreadsheet or modeling software to organize data, perform calculations, and
display results graphically.
• Communicate technical ideas effectively, both in writing and orally.
ht t p: / / www. physi cs. udel . edu/ ~wat son/ phys345/ f r ame/ i ndex_syl l abus. ht ml

Learning Outcomes
What your students will learn within the content of a body of
knowledge
– Each course objective should lead to an actionable learning
outcome: A short statement, formulated from the professor’s
point of view, beginning with a verb and providing actionable
outcomes:
• “Introduce students to … so that”; “help student discover …
and then” ; “develop the ability to … so as to transfer … to …”;
“give students a theoretical and practical overview … to …”.
See The Teaching Goals Inventory (TGI)

Student Learning Outcomes -
Specific Objectives
Specific objectives: from the student’s point of view (Learning goals
and outcomes)
What the student must be able to do or achieve during or at the end of a
learning situation or section (in order to attain the general
objectives).
These objectives are linked to each of the course’s themes and general
objectives:
Permits you to link a given subject and student performance
Each objective must be linked to an action or outcome

Student Learning Outcomes - Specific Objectives
An Example
(Course: Using Technology in Science Education)
At the end of this course, you should be able to:
1. List and contrast current models of science teaching and learning
using technology.
2. Critique current models of teaching and learning using technology in
relation to your personal philosophy of science education.
3. Analyze curricular technology models for alignment with published
standards.
4. Identify effective assessment models for evaluating technology.
5. Discuss how pro-active strategies can establish safe classroom
environments where all students are encouraged to participate and
express their views.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jrios/TEDUC%20513/General%20Course%20Information.html

Actual Examples of Learning Objectives
• Be able to compare and
contrast earnings and cash
flows as measures of
performance.
• Identify and use three format
techniques to increase the
effectiveness of a written
business communication.
• Understand the mechanics of
the cash flow statement.
• Conduct independent research
and write a publishable article
for a newspaper or
professional journal.
• Understand the
implementation of SOX on US
businesses and the resulting
changes.
• Prepare and deliver a
persuasive presentation using
logical and emotional
arguments.

Actual Examples of Learning Objectives
Art History - Survey II
Learning Outcomes and Performance Objectives with their methods of measurement as used to
determine the students’ mastery of those outcomes.Learning Outcomes/Performance
Objectives/Measurements:
• A. The student will identify vocabulary, media, and general theories related to the history of art
from the 14th century through present day. Evaluation: written assignments, including research
papers, and written exams.
• B. The student will distinguish and classify works of art and architecture within the context of
the individual, society, time, place and circumstance within the time frame covered in this course.
Evaluation: written assignments, including research papers, museum/gallery visits and written
exams.
• C. The student will describe the material, cultural and conceptual conditions involved in making
and using works of art and architecture. Evaluation: written assignments, including research
papers, museum/gallery visits and written exams.
• D. The student will interpret works of art and architecture by synthesizing formal analysis with
scholarly research. Evaluation: research papers, exhibit and/or resource critique.
http://www.accd.edu/sac/vat/arthistory/arts1304/syllabus.htm

For Access to Syllabi in all Fields
… Go to:
World Lecture Hall
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/browse.cfm

Overview
 Planning
– Course content
– Group work
 Instructional strategies for student engagement and lifelong
learning

Instructional Strategies
The core question: How to develop a challenging and supportive course climate
that builds on students’ interests, exemplifies the big topics in the field,
teaches interpersonal and collaborative skills, and develops the capacity for
lifelong learning (learning how to learn in the field).
– Decide on a mix of strategies to shape basic skills and procedures,
present information, guide inquiry, monitor individual and group
activities, and support and challenge critical reflection
– The chosen strategies must fit with the outcomes you hope to achieve
– Examples of general instructional strategies:
• Training and coaching
• Lecturing and explaining
• Inquiry and discovery
• Field work and community-based work
• Experiential opportunities (such as internships) and reflection
(portfolios)

Encouraging Active Student Involvement
and Lifelong Learning
• Are course topics related to content, or process, or both? What
embedded activities will help students to learn the tools of the
discipline or field?
• Activities and products that can involve students in sustained
intensive work, both independently and with one a other might
include:
– Group research projects
– Reaction papers on one of several topics provided by the instructor or
suggested by the student(s)
– Challenging the students to “improve the syllabus” by adding or
omitting a reading assignment or two (with a rationale for doing so)
• A learner-centered approach changes the students’ role by
encouraging acceptance of personal responsibility for learning -
“intentional learning” (this can be difficult for students who have
been educated as passive learners).

Considering Issues of Assessment
(To be discussed at greater length in another session)
• Demonstrations of learning should include multiple ways to
represent knowledge and skills
• Consider the role and rationale for individual and group assessment
opportunities
• Provide worked examples and grading rubrics where possible so that
all learners know what constitutes good (successful) work
• Consider using both formative and summative modes of assessment

Examples of Assessment Tools
• Products (essays, research reports, other projects)
• Performance assessments (music, dance, dramatic performance
[e.g., role play], science experiments, demonstrations, debates….)
• Process-focused assessment (journals, learning logs, reflective
statements, oral presentations)
• Assessment of recall and application at the highest cognitive level
(Bloom’s et al. taxonomies)
• Examine the CET website for more helpful information on
assessment:
http://www.usc.edu/programs/cet/resources/assessment/

Overview
 Planning
– Course content
– Group work

Identifying and Assembling Resources
• Consider ways to include the full range of “knowledge nodes” (some
of which may include alternative and conflicting perspectives).
These would include:
– Lectures, panel presentations, case studies, demonstrations,
facilitation, discussion, online discussion boards
– books and readings, films, multimedia, maps, libraries,
museums, theaters, studios, labs, databases, Internet sites, ….
• Involve outside individuals, communities, or officials for guest
lectures and service learning opportunities where appropriate (For
example: USC’s Joint Educational project [JEP].)
• Assign projects that will tap into students’ personal interpretations
by challenging them to search for further information or new, even
contradictory, points of view.

Syllabus Checklist
Expanded from Grunert, J. (2007). The Course Syllabus…
 Course Identifiers
 Instructor Contact Information
 Purpose of Course
 Course Goal and Learning
Objectives
 Course requirements,
Prerequisites, Co-requisites
 Required, Recommended
Materials
 Assignments and Exam Due
Dates
 Evaluation specifics
 Grading criteria
 Policies, Expectations
 Missed exams, quizzes
 Attendance
 Other, as required
 Detailed Schedule
 Reading list with reference

Useful Resources on Course Design and Syllabus Creation
Grunert, Judith (2007) The Course
Syllabus: A Learning-Centered
Approach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Prégent, Richard (2000). Charting
Your Course: How to Prepare to
Teach More Effectively. Madison,
Wisconsin: Atwood (English ed.).

Angelo, Thomas A. and K. Patricia Cross
(1993). Classroom Assessment
Techniques – A Handbook for College
Teachers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-
Bass (2nd
ed.).
Richlin, Laurie (2006). Blueprint for
Learning – Constructing College
Courses to Facilitate, Assess, and
Document Learning. Sterling, VA:
Stylus.

Teaching and Learning Resources on the website of the USC Center for
Excellence in Teaching:
http://www.usc.edu/programs/cet/resources/
Syllabus and Course Design
http://www.usc.edu/programs/cet/resources/creating_syllabi/
USC Office of Curriculum - Sample Syllabus Template
http://www.usc.edu/dept/ARR/curriculum/handbook.html

Review
 Planning
– Course content
– Group work

Design Effective Course Syllabus

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