Chapter 3 Designing Significant Learning Experiences I: Getting Started

Summary This chapter (as well as chapter 4) proposes ideas on how to design courses that will generate ‘powerful learning experiences.’ Chapter 3 includes: general ideas about designing courses introduce a new model of the course design process walk readers through the first 3 steps of the process Chapter 4 will cover the rest of the steps The author suggest that generally there are 2 basic ways to put a course together: ‘list of topics’ approach —the teacher create a list of topics and then proceed to create lectures for each topic subject-centered approach —the teacher takes responsibility for deciding what constitute high-quality learning and then design that quality into the design A new model: Integrate course design The author suggest the following model and its key components (p. 62). Exhibit 3.1 (p 67) provides the following series of 12 steps for ‘integrated’ course design: Initial Design Phase: Build Strong Primary Components Step 1.  Identify important situational factors Step 2.  Identify important learning goals Step 3.  Formulate appropriate feedback and assessment procedures Note: the rest of the 12 steps are covered in Chapter 4. Step 1 focuses on situational factors Exhibit 3.2 (p 69) provides a list of questions related to ‘situational factors’ to reflect on during the initial phase. Step 2 focuses on significant goals Exhibit 3.3 (p 75) provides a list of questions for formulating significant goals during the initial phase. Exhibit 3.4 (p 76-78) provides examples for 3 different topics/subjects. Exhibit 3.5 (p 79) provides verbs for significant learning goals. Step 3 focuses on feedback and assessment The author discusses two types of assessing methods (see figure 3.5, p.83): Audit-ive Refers to an assessment procedure such as the instructor only using midterm and final types of assessments. Educative Refers to a larger variety of assessment procedures for a more complete and rounded assessment of the learner. Brigitte