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Winding Down Fall and Preparing for Winter Term

Originally published December 5, 2025

Looking Ahead: Preparing Syllabi for a New Term

As the fall term begins to wrap up, it’s also time to refresh and finalize course outlines for the winter term. As you prepare your syllabus, check out our tips and ideas in our archived emails and resources in our searchable Guide to Teaching, Learning and Assessment. You can utilize the course design principles offered below to strengthen your course outline or adapt it to new teaching contexts, such as a change in class size or new room setup. Instructors can also connect with an Educational Developer for a one-on-one syllabus review. 

Three key course design principles for building engaged learning experiences are: 

  • Begin with the end in mind for transparent expectations: Review your course learning outcomes to ensure they are measurable and clearly describe what knowledge or skills students should have by the end of the course (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Where possible, consider ways you might refresh your learning outcomes with authentic learning contexts and emerging issues for real-world skill development in your discipline (e.g., incorporate Community Engaged Learning, climate-pedagogy, or responsible generative AI use).

  • Align activities with outcomes to support student engagement: Choose activities that reinforce your learning outcomes and give students opportunities to practice and demonstrate their learning (e.g., more than one opportunity to practice presentation skills when oral communication is a learning outcome). To enhance student opportunities for engagement in your course, you might consider adopting a Universal Design for Learning approach, such as providing students with a choice in demonstrating their learning through weekly written or oral contributions for in-class discussions.

  • Design relevant and aligned assessments to deepen student learning: Create assessments that align with course activities and learning outcomes, as students are more invested in their learning when they see clear connections between course materials, assessments and expectations (Biggs, 1996; Biggs, 2012). Consider designing clear rubrics to make assessment expectations transparent, to aid with instructor feedback and reinforce links to course learning outcomes. Explore ways that you can clearly communicate the expectations of gen AI use in the assessment. 

You can find course syllabus requirements as well as optional statements in the course templates found on Connect. Further information and supports on navigating the course design process can be found in our Guide to Teaching, Learning and Assessment.

Supporting Winter Term Preparations & In Case You Missed it in Fall

This fall term, TEI offered a range of instructional resources and events to support instructors across all campuses, disciplines and faculties, including a new monthly Faculty Learning Community on Gen AI and Academic Integrity, as well as the continuation of our Climate Pedagogy Community of Practice which held its second symposium in November, and an engaged (recorded) session on “Who’s in Your First Year Class” in partnership with Student Success. 

Explore some of TEI’s resources to support your winter term preparations: 

 

 

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