Course Design Course Alignment Course Alignment Summary Page

The Advantages of Doing Course Alignment Exercise

Evaluate the Quality

Conducting a course alignment exercise will help you evaluate the quality of your course design and the learning experience for your students.

Validate Course Design

Validating that a course is well-aligned can help uncover gaps or problem spots that may impact teaching excellence and hinder student learning.

Optimize Course Design

The overarching goal with an alignment exercise is to optimize the teaching, learning and evaluation activities in a course.

Five Design Principles

Meyers and Nulty (2009) identify five design principles that are key to effective course design in higher education. They require teaching and learning materials and experiences that:

  • are authentic and relevant;
  • are constructive, sequential, and scaffolded;
  • require students to engage in higher-order thinking;
  • are aligned with each other and the course outcomes;
  • are challenging, interesting, and provide motivation to learn.

are authentic and relevant;

are constructive, sequential, and scaffolded;

require students to engage in higher-order thinking;

are aligned with each other and the course outcomes;

are challenging, interesting, and provide motivation to learn.

The Process of Course Alignment

A course alignment exercise follows a sequential process:

Click on the image below to expand it

Flowchart illustrating the process of course alignment

The next section will:

  • provide an opportunity to reflect and evaluate your learning.
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