Advice Guide for Designing a Course in a New Modality

Each modality has distinctions that carry implications for how you and your students will engage with the course. Fluency with the various modalities will allow you to better select an effective way to design and facilitate your course. Read through the information in this advice guide, talk with colleagues, and consult with the Center for Teaching & Learning Innovation staff to talk through your questions.

While increasing access to courses for remote students may be a common goal for adjusting to a new modality, there are other factors that you may be considering, such as access, flexibility, and equity. You will likely want to think about who your prospective students are (and their likely experiences with higher education). You will want to think about your capacity for learning and using technology for teaching. You will want to think about how your course fits within your broader program and whether a consistent modality throughout the program or diversifying modalities better serves your students’ needs.

Articulating these goals may require you to navigate competing priorities. For example, you may sense a need for flexibility if your students typically report that they are juggling school with a high volume of work hours (perhaps indicating value of asynchronous learning), but at the same time, you may recognize they also benefit from the structure provided by synchronous learning perhaps because they are still developing self-regulation skills. Which goal (flexibility or structure) is most important, and can you identify a modality (such as Remote Hybrid) that might allow you to meet both needs?

The Learning Objectives for a course serve as a touchstone for making all pedagogical decisions. This may be a good time to refine your Learning Objective using the three criteria in Figure 2.

Learning Objectives may express cognitive (knowledge-based), affective (values-based), and kinesthetic (skills-based) learning. When they are written in student-friendly language, they become a useful communication tool as well as an essential planning tool.

When the Learning Objective are achievable, appropriate, and measurable, reading them in the context of the modalities likely will raise ideas and questions. For instance, if a course has a skills-based element that you have previously scaffolded in-person (maybe you model it in-person, then have your students practice while you give in-the-moment coaching, then your students practice independently, then they demonstrate in front of you for formative feedback, then they demonstrate for a summative assessment), how might you translate that activity to other modalities? For instance, could this learning move to an online setting using videos to effectively capture your teaching and their learning? And if so, what kinds of technological considerations come into play?

You may find that you can see a pathway for using technology to achieve each of your Learning Objectives with relatively little change to the assessments and activities. You may fairly easily identify which modality or modalities could allow you to meet the goals you’ve set for the class (in Step 2) while still achieving the course Learning Objectives using your existing assessments and activities, just translated slightly.

However, you may also be struggling to translate your current assessments and learning activities to a modality with online components, and if so, then taking another approach will be helpful.

The work you did in Step 3 to refine your Learning Objectives is your starting point (identify desired results).

Now you get to engage in some creative thinking. There is often more than one way to assess (or determine acceptable evidence for) a single Learning Objective. As you consider shifting your course to a new modality, begin by brainstorming all the possible ways you could assess each Learning Objective. One concept to hold in mind as you brainstorm is that of “authentic assessment,” which focuses on students engaging in real-world application of higher-order thinking and skills. Authentic assessments may be contrasted with conventional assessments. Our colleagues at the Texas A&M Center for Teaching & Learning crafted an Alternative Assessment Guide for Hybrid/Online Teaching that will likely be helpful in getting your creative gears turning.

You may notice that your brainstorm of assessments includes both formative and summative options. This is ideal! Students will engage in deep learning when there are opportunities to evaluate their ongoing progress (with both self-reflection and expert feedback) toward a Learning Objective. This is considered formative assessment and is usually low- or no-stakes, giving you insight into needs for additional instruction and giving students a sense of their success progression. Additionally, you will need to identify the summative assessment activity where students will ultimately demonstrate their most comprehensive or advanced learning toward each Learning Objective (recognizing that sometimes assessments cover multiple Learning Objectives and sometimes there is a distinct assessment for each one).

As you engage in this brainstorming activity, you may see the possibilities for course modalities expanding – keep note of your ideas – what might work better in one modality versus another, what questions arise, etc.

In the Backward Design process, once you identify formative and summative assessments that align with the Learning Objectives, you strategically choose supporting content, homework, and class activities (plan learning experiences and instruction) to help students gain the appropriate knowledge, values, and/or skills. The facilitation of these instructional experiences may vary by modality. Again, it may be helpful to brainstorm ideas, imagining what you might do in one modality compared with another. These thought experiments will help you clarify your priorities, learning needs, and questions.

Following the steps to this point should have given you some new perspectives on ways to teach your course, likely identifying both possibilities and limitations. You may feel excited or you may feel daunted (or a combination of the two). All these feelings are valid. Designing and teaching a course in a new modality takes time, may feel experimental, and requires resources and support.

We all make decisions differently. You may have clarity about the modality you want to select for your course, right now, based on the thinking you’ve done. If so, great! But if you’re feeling confused, overwhelmed, or torn in multiple directions, it can be helpful to engage in a process for making this decision, likely one that you use in other facets of your life. Do you like making pro/con lists? If so, try doing that for each modality you’re considering. Do you want to talk through your thinking with a trusted colleague or CTLI staff member? Do you want to sketch out a week of your course in a couple different modalities to bring a greater sense of reality to what each would look and feel like?

As you move into the redesign phase, it is important to remember that you have many strengths as a teacher, and you can and should rely on these when contemplating your modality and course design choices. Additionally, while this document gives you a sketch of the design process and a few resources, you will almost certainly need and value additional support. The Center for Teaching & Learning Innovation is here for you; in the near future, we’ll be developing web-based resources. We will also continue hosting workshops and teaching retreats. And we are available for individual consultations. You are not alone!