This document outlines objectives, assessments, and teaching/learning activities for a course. It discusses 8 key questions to develop clear and meaningful learning outcomes for students. It also addresses designing teaching strategies and assessments to engage students and ensure the curriculum is accessible to all. Assessments should evaluate what students can do in multiple ways, and provide scaffolding to support achieving major assignments. Opportunities for self-assessment are also important. The goal is to guide students toward meeting intended course outcomes.

1. OBJECTIVES, ASSESSMENTS AND TEACHING/LEARNING ACTIVITIES
1. Learning/Development Objectives
Phil Race suggests eight questions key to devising courses build on learning outcomes that are
clear, meaningful, and useful to students:
Who do these outcomes belong to? Not just „students‟, please! It‟s me we‟re talking about. Please
refer to me as „you‟ when explaining the learning outcomes.
What am I supposed to become able to do? (i.e. what evidence am I working towards providing?).
How is my evidence of achievement going to be assessed?
Why is this important? Why is it worth me putting time, energy and intellect into working on this?
When am I going to need to produce the necessary evidence? Along the journey of my learning,
or just at the end of the journey?
Where is my evidence going to be assessed? In the lab? In the classroom? In the field? In the
seminar? In the exam room? In the work placement?
So what? What happens if I don‟t provide evidence of my achievement of the outcomes? What
happens if I don‟t achieve them? Does it matter? If it‟s important enough, it should matter. Is it?
Wow! What‟s the „wow‟ factor about this course? Why am I doing it instead of some other course?
What‟s the „wow‟ factor about how this subject is taught here? Why am I here and not somewhere
else? What‟s the „wow‟ factor that this course has that isn‟t anywhere else?
2. Teaching/Learning Activities
How might you build a strategy for engaging student learning? What pattern classroom and out-of-
classroom learning activities and teaching strategies might you build into the course in order to
engage students in making meaning relative to the subject matter they are pursuing?
How will you design your course so that curriculum, instruction, assessment and the environment will
be usable by all students, to the greatest extent possible, from the start of the course?
3. Assessments
How will you know what students are able to do? How will they learn about their learning as they
learn? What scaffolding and support for learning are necessary achieve major course assignments?
o Given the students who will be/you expect to be in your classroom, what you want them to be
able to do/know at the end of your course? With an understanding of deep learning as an
active process, how might you make use of a variety of assessment (formative/summative,
major and minor assignments) to draw the group of students in your class toward the course
goals that you want them to meet – and that they hope to meet?
o weekly quizzes o objective tests o open-ended tests
o group projects o individual projects o hybrid projects
o original research o critical analysis o formal drafted papers
o informal writing o presentations o performances
o How will you measure affective and/or skill related learning (development outcomes)?
o What opportunities can you create for students to engage in self-assessment of their
performance?
Adapted from Phil Race‟s “Making Learning Outcomes Work” (http://phil-race.co.uk/most-popular-downloads),
and L. Dee Fink‟s Significant Learning for Significant Living.