Aligning goals with my course

In this blog,  I would like to share my plan for a course that will begin soon.  The course is Systems Analysis and Design and is famous for being a "boring" course - one filled with plenty of lectures and theoretical concepts - enough to bore students to sleep.  Add to this is a prescriptive assessment strategy including a comprehensive final exam which has been a great hurdle for students!  A plan was required to make this a course that students are engaged in their learning and motivated to prepare for their final assessment. 

Plan:

With this in mind, I have for the first time developed a plan incorporating key teaching strategies, feedback points and assessments.  Normally, I would create a course guide detailing only the schedule and the assessment strategy.  The assessments were planned well in advance, hence they aligned quite well to the learning outcomes and the appropriate levels of taxonomy.  However, teaching strategies were incorporated more on a weekly basis, due to which, it was more of a reactive strategy.   When there is no plan, there is a temptation to resort to what has worked best in the past. 

This process of designing teaching strategies for each learning outcome/course goal at the onset of a course has been an eye opener.  This way I am more prepared to implement a strategy incorporating current techniques to improve student engagement.   Planning ahead also ensures that there is a better alignment of teaching strategies, the course outcomes and assessment strategies.  The only threat being the final comprehensive assessment which could be an external exam.  As a course teacher I have no control over the questions picked and on the quality of questions used.  Often there are cases where the questions picked do not match the taxonomy of the course learning outcomes.  A quality issue!

I am looking forward to using Wikis and Concept Maps that I have not used before.  From my readings and research on how these have been implemented by other educators, I think these will enable constructive alignment in this course.