Teaching Resources for Clear Course Design

The Provost’s Office manages and supports new course proposals through forms and resources and a dedicated Canvas community. Faculty interested in writing new courses typically begin by consulting their department curriculum committee and/or the chair.

Using backward design ensures the essentials of a strong course: student learning outcomes, a course outline, assignments, assessments, and learning activities.

Course design frameworks establish consistency in design while providing a model to follow throughout development and while teaching, enabling the integration of pedagogical best practices throughout each element of your course. In short, course design frameworks make your course the best it can be, enhance the student experience, and streamline the teaching experience for faculty.

The most effective syllabi communicate essential information about the course and instructor, learning objectives, required materials, and assessments, and a link to a course calendar.

Assignments and assessments allow students to apply and demonstrate learning relevant to a course learning objective. Assessments, assignments or any task you assign can be individual or collaborative, brief or lengthy, or in any genre or format. Ideally assessments have two functions: they at once further student knowledge and skill through completion and they provide information about learning.

Choose relevant and meaningful material that reflects your discipline or subject area and fits firmly within the confines of your course as defined by your student learning outcomes. Consider the importance of student-friendly, contemporary content and strategies for connecting disciplinary excellence to real-world relevance.

The resources provided here are designed to help faculty create effective online learning experiences that account for students’ varied prior experiences and the affordances and limitations of the technologies we use to teach.

Compressed or accelerated courses require instructors to pay special attention to course design to ensure a robust and manageable course.

Grades are powerful teaching tools, despite the angst they can evoke. Develop a strategy for grading that will leverage grades to maximize learning without putting yourself, the instructor, into an impossible workload situation.

At Montclair, instructors determine their attendance policies. Each instructor should assess what works best for their course’s learning objectives and clearly state these policies in the syllabus. 

Instructors can mitigate cheating in their courses by understanding the reasons students cheat and using course design that simultaneously addresses students’ reasons for cheating and limits opportunities to cheat.

Artificial intelligence is transforming how universities teach, conduct research, and carry out their work. At Montclair State University, we are approaching these developments strategically, seeking opportunities to advance our mission while ensuring that AI is used responsibly, ethically, and in ways that support academic excellence.