Design Your Course
Your Instructional Designer
Every school has a CETL Instructional Designer. Yours will email you within your first week — you do not have to find us.
Business & Management
Felicia Harris-Foster
fharrisfoster@ndnu.edu
Education
Lia Schraeder
LSchraeder@ndnu.edu
Psychology
Kevin Zaragoza
kzaragoza@ndnu.edu
Designing your course
This is the most valuable thing you can do before you arrive, and it needs no login.
Course design happens in your head and in a Word document long before it happens in Canvas. Faculty who arrive with outcomes drafted and a syllabus in progress spend their first weeks teaching. Faculty who arrive empty spend them catching up.
Backward design
Start with what students should be able to do at the end, decide how you will know they can do it, and only then build the content that gets them there. This sounds obvious and is easy to skip — most of us learned to design forward from content, not backward from outcomes.
- Write your Course Learning Outcomes. Measurable (verbs you can observe — analyze, apply, design, evaluate, justify; not "understand"), significant, achievable, and specific to your course. Three to five is usually right; more than that and they overlap.
- Decide what counts as evidence. For each outcome ask: how would I know a student achieved this? That points straight at the assessment. "Design a research study" calls for a design assignment, not a multiple-choice quiz.
- Design the learning activities that get students from where they are to where the assessment proves they arrived. Mix instruction, application, discussion, reflection, and feedback.
The alignment test — the single most useful tool in course design.
Draw a grid: one column per outcome, one row per assessment and activity. Mark which outcome each item supports. If an outcome has no assessment, you cannot measure it. If an activity supports no outcome, you may not need it. You can build this in a spreadsheet this afternoon.
Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI)
A federal requirement for online courses. To qualify as distance education rather than correspondence, a course must include regular, predictable, substantive interaction between instructor and student. "I check email when I can" is not regular. "I reply within 24 hours on weekdays and post a weekly announcement" is.
| Counts | Does not count on its own |
|---|---|
| Weekly announcements that synthesize and preview | Auto-graded quizzes with no instructor feedback |
| Personal feedback beyond a rubric score (3–5 sentences minimum) | Pre-recorded video with no follow-up |
| Actively facilitating discussion — follow-up questions, weaving connections | Readings without discussion or feedback |
| Live or recorded mini-lectures; regular office hours | Generic boilerplate sent to every student |
Your syllabus
Both a contract with students and an introduction to your course. Every NDNU syllabus needs: course identification; your contact info and response-time expectation; the catalog description; Course Learning Outcomes and their alignment to Program Learning Outcomes; required materials; a week-by-week schedule; assessments, weights, and grading scale; policies (attendance, late work, academic integrity, AI use, accommodations); and student resources.
Write it for students, not just for compliance. Open with a warm paragraph in your own voice. Use "you" and "we." Front-load how to reach you and what to do first. Put the heavy policy text later. Make it scannable.
Do not write it from scratch.
CETL maintains the NDNU syllabus template — a Word document with the structural sections, the institutional policy language already written, and three ready-made options each for your AI policy and your late-work policy. Fill in the brackets and you have a defensible syllabus in about an hour. Your Instructional Designer has the current version for your program — ask them for it, and send them your draft for review before the term starts. Turnaround is typically within a week. They will also be in touch in your first week, so you may not need to ask at all.
Where syllabi most often go wrong
- Leaving placeholder text in the final syllabus. Search for "[" before you publish. Every term, someone does not.
- Keeping more than one AI option. Pick one, delete the others. Students get genuinely confused.
- Setting a late-work policy you cannot enforce. The most common is "I am flexible." That is not a policy — it is an invitation to negotiate with thirty people individually.
- Forgetting to update the schedule for the actual term you are teaching.
Go deeper on the CETL site:
- Collaborative Course Development — find the right level of support for your timeline.
- Course Development Checklist — all six phases, from assignment to publication.
- Course Development Toolkit — templates and worksheets, including RSI planning.