Do I need to review my course design?
You should regularly try to review your course design to ensure your course is up to date and inclusive, whilst building resilience and sustainability for the future, this includes reviewing your content, activities and assessments, whilst keeping in mind the Principles for the Delivery of Education. We recommend you start by reviewing your learning outcomes, to ensure your students will be able to achieve them no matter if they are studying online, hybrid or on campus, followed by taking a storyboard approach to structuring your course and planning your activities and assessments.
A useful resource is our examples and inspiration pages, which focus on teaching presence and structuring blended learning environment.
- Learning Outcomes
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Writing Learning Outcomes
You may find the following helpful if you need to revisit or refresh your Learning Outcomes
- Guidance on writing aims and learning outcomes (PDF)
- Devising Learning Outcomes (video clip)
Other useful Learning Outcome resources
- Writing and using good learning outcomes (PDF by Leeds Beckett University)
- Learning Outcomes with Bloom's Verb Guide, Centre of Innovation, University of Liverpool, 2019.
- Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF)
- Storyboarding
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Storyboarding Your Course
Organise your teaching and learning material using a Storyboard, so that the material flows and there is some organised structure, which your students can recognise.
- Based upon Gilly Salmon's model of 'Carpe Diem'
- PowerPoint resources/templates:
- Storyboard
- Balancing the Curriculum (sorting the cards)
- Programme Overview from University of Dundee
- Constructive Alignment
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Constructive Alignment
When designing your course, remember to think about constructive alignment, so do your learning outcomes align with your teaching and learning materials/activities and the assessment.
- John Biggs' paper on Aligning teaching for constructing learning
- Curriculum Design Philosophy by Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool
- Video clip 'Course Design: constructive alignment
- Content Development
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Content Development
There is lots of good advice on the internet about good course design and ideas for content creation, below are some suggestions:
- Course Design Guidelines, which includes making your material accessible and inclusive
- Create own materials, using applications such as Microsoft 365 with Word and PowerPoint
- Consider curating external materials, instead of your own, such as Open Education Resources (OERs) or links to videos.
- Record materials using Panopto
- Encourage student generated content
Refer to the Deliver and Engage elements for further suggestions
Reading Lists
Remember to provide reading lists for your students, making effective use of Leganto Reading lists, which are integrated in to MyAberdeen course areas and provide seamless access to digital content held within our Library collections, allowing for a smoother and better student experience.
Other resources and tools:
- Video Scribe
- Blackboard Learn: Where Do I Start? (our virtual learning environment, MyAberdeen)
- Heriot Watt's Supporting Student Learning Online: Intoducing the Rapid Response Toolkit