Designing a course this semester?
CEPI works through this sequence with faculty at any stage, from a first outline to a full redesign. Most collaborations start with one conversation.
Book a meeting with the CEPI team
Or write to cepi@sfbu.edu.
Course design at SFBU begins from one question: what should students be able to do by the end that they cannot do at the start?
Starting from that question is called backward design. Answering it in one sentence gives every later decision a test. An example is “evaluate whether a machine learning approach suits a given business problem.” Assessments, activities and content follow from the answer, and the course holds together.
Six decisions, in order
Design holds together when decisions are taken in a particular order. These six are the sequence CEPI uses in consultations.
1
The Destination
Three to five sentences that begin “By the end of this course, my students will be able to...” They use action verbs such as analyze, design, evaluate, construct and defend. Every later decision answers to these sentences.
2
Evidence Before Teaching
A decision about how a student will demonstrate each outcome, with that assessment built before the teaching is planned. Assessment shows what a course values.
3
The Unit Structure
Each unit built as Think, Do, Create, with the draft schedule marked against the three phases to check the balance.
4
Access from the Start
More than one reason to care, more than one format for the material and more than one way to show the same outcome. Universal Design for Learning began with the observation that a building designed for wheelchair users is easier for everyone to use. Access designed in at the start costs little, and adding it later usually means a redesign.
5
The Place of AI
A statement of what AI does in each major assignment and what the student must supply, written into the assignment itself. Teaching with AI describes this decision.
6
The Feedback Loop
Low-stakes practice before every high-stakes assessment, and a point at mid-semester where the instructor asks students what is working.
At the faculty institute
Faculty from different schools work through course design prompts at Roots & Branches, SFBU’s annual faculty institute. Each has their own course in front of them.
Where Bloom’s taxonomy fits now
Bloom’s still gives outcome writing its vocabulary, and its point about sequence still holds. What has changed is that written work is no longer a reliable sign of the thinking behind it. Creating sits at the top of Bloom’s, and it is now often where students begin. The guidebook’s new learning cycle names the seven steps students now take with AI: prompting, generating, doubting, arguing, shaping, reflecting and recreating. SFBU therefore assesses the judgment behind the work, and Assessment develops this.
Take this with you
Three actions for this week
1
Run the “understand” test on your outcomes.
Where an outcome says understand, know or appreciate, ask what a student who did would be able to do, and write that instead.
Prompt 01 in Resources reads a syllabus as a student would and returns replacement text.
2
Write the final assessment brief before the week-one slides.
The brief students will receive, with criteria. If it is hard to write, the outcomes are not yet clear, and this is the cheapest moment to find out.
3
Book a mid-semester listening moment now.
Week six or seven, three questions, ten minutes: what is helping you learn, what is getting in the way, what should change. Put it in the calendar while the course can still respond.
One question to keep
Which of the six decisions have I not yet made for this course?
Download the Faculty Guidebook
The full argument, worked examples and sources. PDF.
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