Course Mapping and Learning Objectives

Questions for Course Mapping

1. How many modules will you have? (One per week is typical but variations are acceptable and may make sense for some courses).
2. How will you organize the modules? (By course topic, is typical but you may have another idea.)
3. If your course is a blended course, when will the face-to-face meetings occur and how does that timing affect the mapping of your assignments?
4. How will you address the overall course learning goals through the learning objectives for each module. (See the materials in the second half of this module for info about writing module-based learning objectives.)
5. What course materials have you already identified? (Readings? Case Studies? Videos?) Don’t worry if these are not yet nailed down—but putin placeholders in each module with the idea that you will want certain kinds of materials and related activities.) Shoot for some variety and try to take advantage of the media rich environment that web-based teaching can provide.
6. How many and what types of assignments do you want to include in the course and how will you distribute the work throughout the course modules. Remember that when you give students assignments, either to stimulate and develop or to assess their learning, they will need to receive some kind of response or feedback, from you, or from their peers or another potential audience—so plan for your time and workload and think about a variety of ways they can receive feedback.

Again, this is a work in progress, so you may not have a clear idea yet about the exact assignments you will give, but you can start to think about how many and about what types of assignments you may want to give (a group project, a presentation, a case analysis, a VoiceThread discussion, a paper, a podcast, etc.)

Some things to consider, related to assignments:

• If the course includes a larger assignment like a research project, a group project or a major presentation, think about how you can distribute that work over the whole length of the course, as a series of shorter assignments and due dates.
• For a fully online course, assignments are one way to build in some interactivity among the students.
• For a blended course: consider how best to use the F2F time doing things that make the best used of those opportunities.