Improving Subject Design

How do you improve subject design?
What should you include in a subject outline?
Designing courses to develop graduate attributes
Find out more about subject & course design

How do you improve subject design?

The way you design your subject depends on a lot of things, such as:

There are no recipes. However, if you want to improve students' learning, here are some starting points for good subject design:

  1. Look at your learning objectives

    Look at whether your learning objectives, assessment and teaching and learning activities are constructively aligned (Biggs 1999).

    • Do your learning objectives focus on what students will be able to do or understand after completing your subject?
      Compare these two statements:
      'As a result of successfully completing this subject, students will be able to use theories x, y and z to interpret and develop possible responses for common problems in group dynamics.'
      'This subject aims to cover theories x, y, and z and their application to group dynamics.'
      The first statement is much clearer about what students will be expected to do. The second is really a statement of subject content rather than learning objectives.

    • If students complete the assessment tasks and meet the criteria, will they have achieved the learning objectives?
      Students focus on assessment. It can be very revealing to ask some students about what they did to complete a particular assessment task or prepare for the test or exam. Sometimes tasks that we think require understanding can actually be passed by students who have rote learned chunks of lecture notes, formulae or lists of facts. If students can pass the assessment through rote learning or other minimalist strategies, they may miss achieving learning objectives which focus on understanding, thinking critically, posing and solving complex problems, etc.

    • Do students participate in learning activities which help them to achieve the learning objectives?
      Examples of aligned activities include:
      • problem-based learning activities for an objective requiring problem posing and solving;
      • a case study for an objective about making connections between theory and practice;
      • a learning journal for an objective about reflecting on the learning process;
      • a role play for an objective about being able to understand alternative perspectives.

    If you want to read more, an excellent article to begin with is: 'What the student does: Teaching for enhanced learning' (J. Biggs (1999), Higher Education Research and Development, 18 (1) 57-75). This focuses on using the ideas of constructive alignment to help all students to learn in the ways that the more-academically inclined do naturally.

  2. Review what you already know

    Review what you already know about students and their learning in your subject. Ask yourself questions like:

    • What do I know about how my students approach learning in my subject?

    • What factors most influence their approaches?

    • What concepts or ideas seem particularly difficult for students to learn and why do students find them difficult?

    • How do students' ideas change from the beginning to the end of the subject?

    • What prior understandings, skills, attitudes or misconceptions do students bring with them to the subject?

    • What helps students to learn the important things in the subject?

    • What puzzles me about students' learning in the subject?

    Whether you've been teaching the subject for a long time or have just started, it's useful to collect some information directly from your students - not necessarily about what they like or dislike but about their learning and what helps them to learn. One way to do this is by asking them to write responses to some simple open-ended questions such as:

    • How will you know that you've learned something in this subject?

    • What's helping you to learn in this subject?

    • What makes it harder for you to learn?

    Once you have students' responses, you'll have a better idea of the things to keep - or enhance - and the things that should be changed. To decide what to do next you may need to consult other sources, like colleagues, literature on learning and teaching, or learning and teaching staff from IML.

What should you include in a subject outline?

There are two kinds of subject outlines: outlines for students and outlines for accreditation. They are of course related to each other.

Outlines for students

Outlines for students are usually the most detailed. They are written to give students guidance about what they'll learn and do in the subject. Typically they would include:

Download templates for a subject outline for students.

Outlines for accreditation

Outlines for accreditation are written to communicate your subject intentions to your colleagues on the Faculty Board. They would contain information required to enable your colleagues to understand how the subject fits with others in the course, what students would gain from it, etc.

Download a template for a subject outline for accreditation.

Designing courses to develop graduate attributes

You may have been talking about graduate attributes frameworks for courses in your Faculty. So where can you learn more about Graduate Attributes and how to design courses that develop them? Read the report on Generic Capabilities of ATN University Graduates. This report was developed by the ATN Teaching and Learning Committee. The report includes background information, a framework for action and a set of case studies that illustrate ways of developing graduate attributes in courses and subjects.

Find out more about subject & course design