When a teacher has designed, or redesigned his course he will be satisfied if ……..
- The students are motivated and engaged.
- The students finish the assignments according the design, learn from their mistakes.
- The students are active in the group activities.
- The studens follow the lectures and study the content properly.
- The students have good results on the tests.
Other reasons to be satisfied are
- The course fits nicely in the curriculum. The course description is accepted by the curriculum committee.
- The teacher himself likes to do his teaching job and experience the time spend not too much.
- The teaching and learning materials are available and in good order.
What can a teacher do to design and develop such a course? This will depend on the specific situation of the teacher. If teacher only want to change some assignments, he or she is often helped with some useful examples of comparable assignments. Maybe he or she has helped with a short discussion about the relations between the learning objectives and these assignments: are these assignments relevant for the formulated learning objectives.
The complete other situation is if the teacher should design a new course or introduce instructional changes in an existing course. However, the teacher has no clear idea how he should approach this task. Teacher could decide to follow a systematic and creative instructional design process, to study some good practices, to study relevant parts of learning theories to find consequences for his course, or a combination of these.
In this book, I tried to describe the instructional design activities the teacher can follow to solve the design and development task in different practical situations.
In the second part of this book I tried to apply in curriculum development. In curriculum development the curriculum committee will study the same learning theories but the product they have two things is quite different from a course.