Brief Review of Backward Design

Typical Design Process

For many people, designing a course starts with content. They have a book or a video, or a set of texts that they want to use and they try to make everything else fit with the content they want to cover. While this can result in an okay course, there is a much better way.

Think Backwards

Planning a course with the end in mind - or "backward design" is a much more effective way of planning an online/hybrid/blended learning experience.

In the simplest terms, backwards design means determining:

1. what you want students to learn and be able to do as a result of your class,
2. the best ways to measure whether they have actually learned, and
3. how students will acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes. 

The process begins with big ideas, which will shape the way students think about a subject and develop skills and values related to the discipline. From these big ideas emerge student understandings, which bridge the abstract to the concrete and measurable learning outcomes that describe specifically what students will know and be able to do. In short, we want students to be able to do something with the knowledge they are learning in our courses.  Once we have the learning outcomes, we figure out how we will know whether they have learned and to what degree [summative assessments] and what learning activities will help them practice using the knowledge and develop the desired skills and attitudes. Designing Instruction for Learning [PDF] Download Designing Instruction for Learning [PDF]