Moving Forward with Backward Design

This presentation will give clear purpose for why instructional designers, instructors, and institutions should consider changing from a traditional content focused course design approach to using a Backward Design approach. According to Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010 (Allen and Seaman, 2010) from the eighth annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning, online course enrollment in the US grew by nearly one million students over a year ago. The report finds approximately 5.6 million students were enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2009. With the world at their doorstep, there are so many options available to online students that institutions cannot compete solely from technical innovation. Instead, educational providers need to attract more learners by delivering a better quality learning experience than the competition. Moving Forward with Backward Design shares an overview of the instructional design process coined by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in the 2005 book Understanding by Design. Backward Design is an instructional design process that focuses on setting goals before creating learning activities or content to be taught. By keeping a constant aim on teaching towards the goals, the course design in ensured to contain content, learning activities, and assessments that remain focused and organized, ultimately promoting better learning outcomes for students. In traditional methods of instructional design and in Backward Design, goals and objectives are generated. Often in the traditional model, following the goals, a list of content to be taught is identified. The main difference with Backward Design is that once the goals are identified, then the assessments methods are identified, then finally the content and learning activities (lessons) necessary for a student to successfully complete the assessment criteria are finally targeted. We will look at applying these tools in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy, a categorization of learning objectives based on the cognitive domains. Goals - envision the use of Backward Design as significantly contributing toward the design or redesign of content focused online courses - gain practical examples of Backward Design as applied to specific segments of several different online courses - determine pedagogical purpose for use of Backward Design in relation to Bloom's Taxonomy Throughout this session, we anticipate a great discussion to allow discovery of further instructional strategies and broader pedagogical approaches in our online courses for adult learners at a distance. Participants will be asked interactive questions and answers regarding their current experience in using Backward Design for transforming traditional content focused online courses to online learning that focuses on learning outcomes. Audience contribution will be actively sought from the start. First we will conduct a free write exercise where participants will be asked to take a few moments to focus their thoughts on instructional design and Backward Design and what it means to them. Participants will then be asked to work with a partner to review their thoughts and to agree on one main issue or topic related to Backward Design that most interests them. Volunteers will be sought to share their interest statement with the entire group. This will allow participants to take an active role in shaping the discussions conducted throughout the presentation, creating a participatory environment which will allow us to share our story and invite others to contribute their experiences as well. Through attending this presentation, you will be provided with access to the worksheets we use to guide the Backward Design process, along with examples of several course elements generated through following the principles of Backward Design. We will share with you the step by step process used to promote Backward Design among colleagues and the results of piloting this design approach with different courses and course elements. These experiences and artifacts will be shared with participants for replication among your own instructional design teams. During this presentation the following elements of Backward Design will be discussed in detail: The role of essential questions in relations to a pre-existing course syllabus. Writing effective learning objectives. Creating engaging learning activities. Using Blooms Taxonomy to identify higher and lower order thinking skills appropriate for course outcomes. Creating authentic assessments.