PRINCIPLES OF COURSE DESIGN

A Course design ought to follow the criteria’s mentioned below:

• Challenge students to higher level of learning.
Mostly all courses require “lower level” learning, i.e., comprehending and remembering basic information’s. But many of the courses never go beyond these. There is a need to introduce higher levels of learning in schools and colleges. “Higher level learning” includes problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking.

• Uses Active learning forms.
Some learning are “passive”, i.e., reading and listening. But this kind of learning does not help much. There is a necessity of the active learning type where the students are much more involved in what they are doing.” Higher level learning,” almost by definition, requires the active learning type.

• Gives feed backs to improve learning standards.
Teachers should encourage student’s performance by giving them regular feed backs on their learning skills. Higher level learning and active learning require frequent and immediate feedback for students to know whether they are “doing it” correctly or whether they require more advise on the topic or not.

• Uses structured sequences for improving learning standards.
Variety of forms of learning makes a course. It is not possible to stick to one kind of learning. Different learning styles can be adopted for time to time to achieve the required goal. But these various learning activities also need to be structured in a sequence such that earlier classes lay the foundation for complex and higher level learning tasks in later classes.

• Helps in assessing and grading performances.
The grading system should be objective, reliable, based on learning, flexible, and communicated in writing. There is a possibility for the students to feel that even though they are learning something significant they are unhappy if their grade does not reflect this. The Grading system ought to be reliable to fix things in place.

Source: http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/finks5.htm