Course Design & Syllabus Development

The scholarship of teaching and learning emphasizes the importance of using learning goals or outcomes to guide course planning and design. The clear, transparent communication of course plans to students in the form of a syllabus (as well as a Moodle site or website) not only supports student success in our classes, but can serve to reveal the “hidden curriculum” of academic life to those who are not already familiar with it. The following resources offer useful perspectives, strategies, and philosophies about both course design and syllabus development.

Course design

• Fink, D. (2005) Integrated Course Design (pdf)
• Bowen, R. S.  (2017). Understanding by Design. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching (please note that Vanderbilt’s site includes lots of other excellent teaching guides!)
• Synopsis of the Cutting Edge Course Design Approach (developed by Barbara J. Tewksbury [Hamilton College] and R. Heather Macdonald [College of William and Mary])
• Backwards course design template
• Learning Environment Toolkit (from the Georgia Tech Center for Teaching and Learning)
• Five ways to ease students off the lecture and into active learning (Jeremy Murphy in the Chronicle of Higher Ed) (new!)
• Strategies to support student learning from Retrieval Practice (new!)

Syllabus development

• How to Create a Syllabus (Gannon, in the Chronicle of Higher Education)
• How to Turn Your Syllabus into an Infographic (Newbold, 2017)
• Tulane University’s Accessible Syllabus Project
• A Syllabus for All Learners (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health CTL, 2023)
• Decolonizing Your Syllabus?: You Might Have Missed Some Steps (Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research [CLEAR], 2019)
• Dr. Kim Case’s Syllabus Challenge: Infusing Inclusive Practices
• Bryn Mawr Professor Chanelle Wilson on Revolutionizing My Syllabus: The Process (new!)
• The Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool (Taylor et al., 2019) (new!)