Tip Sheets: Course Design

Careful planning and implementation of assignments will help your students produce what you expected.

The goal of assignment sequencing is a stepwise development of students’ skills (i.e., movement from preliminary to higher level critical thinking or…

Designing a course is a significant task, but following a proven strategy can help. The following design sequence is one possible order of completing…

When designing a course, it's essential that the intended learning outcomes, the assessments, and the learning activities are aligned with one another

Start by writing student-centred learning outcomes

This document is a general resource for teaching teams seeking to incorporate lab activities in their remote courses

The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, known as Bloom's Taxonomy (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, & Krathwohl, 1956) is one of the most recognized…

For more information related to Bloom's Taxonomy, refer to the Bloom's Taxonomy Teaching Tip.

Community-based learning is a high impact practice which can improve student retention and engagement, and help students better absorb, retain, and…

In a flipped classroom students engage with lectures or other materials outside of class to prepare for an active learning experience in the…

Here are some questions to consider when designing a course. Exploring these questions should help you develop a detailed course plan. 

Course outlines, or syllabi, are an integral part of course design

If you choose to create your own course material, keep file sizes small

What can you do as an instructor to encourage your students to do honest work?

While ePortfolios might be described as digital collections of artifacts, a good academic ePortfolio also represents a process

Five Things to Make Your Students Appreciate Your LEARN Site

Service-learning is a form of experiential learning that combines relevant community service experiences with reflective exercises for a powerful…

The following questions are meant to guide you through the process of designing a “course” or unit of study

Different assignments make different cognitive demands on students. 

Most people strive to be gracious and sensitive when accommodating another person's needs.

Resilient course design is a framework for understanding how to design courses that are less susceptible to disruption

You're working on designing your course and now it's time to decide on the content and how to organize it

Learning independently can be challenging, even for the brightest and most motivated students.

Independent study experiences can be extremely rewarding both for students and their advising instructors

Ensuring that courses and program activities include global perspectives is central to the development of an internationalized university.

While stress can be a normal part of the university experience, instructors can design courses that focus on learning while reducing the unnecessary…

Asynchronous learning means that the instructor and the students in the course all engage with the course content at different times (and from…

Metacognition has been defined as “one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them

Many instructors in engineering, math and science have students solve “problems”

A blended course sometimes reduces face-to-face "seat time" so that students can pursue additional teaching and learning activities online.

As a provider of educational programs, the University of Waterloo is legally obligated to accommodate students with disabilities, as per the Ontario…

Good course design involves considering the strengths and needs of all learners. 

Good teaching involves considering the strengths and needs of all learners.

The term universal design (UD) originated in the mid-1980s from the architect Ronald Mace, who is internationally recognized for advancing the…

Instructors often focus on content when embarking on course design, but it's equally important to think about the net result of a course: student …