Importance of Alignment in Your Course
We all know that our cars need an alignment service once in a while. But have you thought about the alignment of your course? Ensuring online course alignment means that all critical course components work together to confirm that your students achieve the stated learning outcomes. You will want to be sure that you have aligned critical course components such as teaching materials, learning activities, assessments, other learning tools. Teaching materials contribute to the learning objectives; Learning activities promote the learning objectives; learning tools support the learning objectives. Learning objectives form the basis of your course. When you begin the process of creating your online course, the first step is to define learning objectives for the course and then for the Modules, Units or Weeks, depending on how the course is set up. Keep the Learning Objectives Student-Centered Learning objectives should focus on what students will be able to do, rather than on what the instructor will teach. The learning objectives need to be precisely and clearly stated using concrete and measurable verbs. Objectives that are written with words like “understand”, “know”, “learn”, “realize” are hard to measure. Rather than “understand” we can expect the student to be able to “Interpret”. Instead of asking a student to “know”, we can ask students to “Describe”. These verbs can be measured and require a higher order of thinking on […]
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