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Read Chapter 1: Surfacing Backward Design from Small Teaching Online. Come to the next session ready to discuss using the backward design process in redesigning your course with OER.
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Reflect
Post your responses to the following questions in the comment box below:
- How is backward design different than your current process for designing learning experiences for your students?
- How might you use backward design to redesign learning experiences in your course(s) using open educational resources and other no-cost materials?
- What are your key take-aways from the chapter, “Surfacing Backward Design”?
Bonus
If you have time and interest, here is a podcast episode interviewing the author of Small Teaching Online, Flower Darby.
One thought on “Backward Design”
1. How is backward design different than your current process for designing learning experiences for your students?
I suppose it is more intentional in structure and presumes to know more about what the emergent issues will be than I would ordinarily presume. In a way this is the formal opposite of the participatory models of the previous day’s discussion in the seminar. Replaces “who are you and how might that experience bear on this study and thereby transform the object we are encountering?” with, “here is the learning experience/ expanded mentality/ epistemological endpoint you will have reached as a result of what is planned.”
Not that there is anything wrong with that. Why not both?
2. How might you use backward design to redesign learning experiences in your course(s) using open educational resources and other no-cost materials?
My initial feeling is that all materials have a cost, whether it be in the form of tuition passed from what *was* the State funding of education, to the contemporary pay-to-play model, based on a mandatory assessment of students’ means. “Cost” should now also recognize that of the contemporary means of access – technological, urban housing and transportation, cyberspace – which are more costly and inescapably impinge on the daily life of students (and teachers) than ever.
Every course has an arc, and arcs within the arc, that set paths to reach learning objectives. Making these arcs more transparent may give students a more developed preconception of what is required of them in the course and in each assignment. Clarity is of course a good thing, provided it is not created at the cost of creating a course which is rigid or overtly pre-controlled. The course’s learning and practice demands upon students may be assumed by them as the course unfolds and the students discover their capabilities; capabilities which can at times appear to have been previously denied or remained unexplored.
From the suggestions in the text, I can see more clearly distinguishing “summative versus formative” categorizations of the work we do, although all of the work of learning ideally does both, to my view.
3. What are your key take-aways from the chapter, “Surfacing Backward Design”?
“Course materials, learning activities, assessments, and objectives should all align… Every element of a course should line up with and support the achievement of the learning objectives.”
“Students receive significant cognitive benefits from trying learning tasks before they are ready… Start with the end in mind, and… tell your students why, too. They’ll appreciate your transparency and will be more motivated to engage meaningfully when they see the relevance of class activities beginning in the first week ”