Backward design and constructive alignment are systematic ways to plan courses that align learning outcomes, assessments, and teaching methods. They help educators create meaningful and effective learning experiences for students. The purpose of the exercises on this page is to promote reflection on how a backward design approach ensures that your course content and activities are relevant and interlinked, leading to better outcomes. The next page will focus on constructive alignment as your goal for backward design.

What is Backward Design?

Backward design is a course planning method that starts with the end in mind. It involves three steps:

Identify desired results: Define what students should know and be able to do by the end of the course, using clear and measurable learning outcomes.
Determine acceptable evidence: Design assessments that align with the learning outcomes and provide evidence of student learning and achievement.
Plan learning experiences and instruction: Select and organise course content and activities that support the learning outcomes and prepare students for the assessments.

Backward design involves three sets of decisions

Dee Fink (2013) describes the steps of backward design as making three key sets of decisions:

What do you want the students to learn?
How will students (and the teacher) know if they are learning?
What will the teacher and students need to do for students to learn?

By starting from a learning-centred approach, it is easier to prioritise these content-oriented learning outcomes into three groups: the critical, the important-but-not-critical, and the nice-to-know. A learning-centred course begins with the answer to the question “What can and should students learn in relation to this subject?” and then move forward to organise activities, assessments, and content presentation in a way that supports that learning.

Once you have grouped and prioritised your outcomes you’ll need to think about how to order them in the course. You can start to create a course map below but we will come back to this in module 3..

Fink, D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass:

To do

What is backward design

In this video (5.57 min) Chris Tuffnell introduces the concept of backward design, starting with what learners should know or do by the end of the session or course. (NB: Chris Tuffnell works as an educational developer at the University of Wollongong in Dubai which is why he refers to driving around Dubai!)

Your choice

If you prefer to read the transcript for this video you can open it in preview mode or download the Word file below.

M1.4 Backward design.docx

Tip: If you open the ReadSpeaker TextAid link in the "Module" view you will be able to Annotate the file as well as download an audio version of the file to listen to on-the-go (one page at the time)!

Reflect

What do you want your learners to be able to do at the end of your teaching session or after completing your course? Write you reflections in your reflection log.

Map your course starting with the learning outcomes

Download the course map and start to fill in your learning outcomes. The University of Arkansas has a good page with Bloom's taxonomy and suggestions for verbs in each category.

In depth

Backward Design: A Powerful Course Design Method with Guidelines from Bloomsburg University.

Some of the content found on this page was designed by Indiana University and adapted for use by the Institute for Faculty Development at Vanguard University. This content is offered under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license and should be considered under this license unless otherwise noted. The original content was imported from “Designing and Teaching for Impact in Online Courses” from within Canvas Commons.

On this page