Course Alignment

You have written goals and learning objectives before, but they take on added importance in online courses.  Given that you will not be seeing your students face-to-face, it is crucial that you craft clear statements about what specifically you want your students to learn.  Well-crafted learning objectives guide the online course development process. The choice of course materials, assignments or activities, and assessments should all align with the learning objectives. Each element of the course should relate back to one or more of the learning objectives.  So let’s think about “alignment”.

When a course is aligned, there is a clear “flow” from program goals to course objectives to weekly learning objectives to learning strategies and activities, and finally to assessments.

In developing learning objectives, it is useful to consider Bloom’s Taxonomy … with particular attention to the verbs used in each level of Bloom’s.

The verbs help drive you towards measureable learning outcomes:

Another aspect of alignment is using the right technology for the right content and the right teaching process to achieve the right outcome. The correct mix of technology, pedagogy, and content is discussed in detail at http://tpack.org.  I will go into TPACK in more detail in the Teaching Technology Toolbox.