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Approaching Your Course Syllabus

Originally published August 14, 2026

Designing learning outcomes with the end in mind

Designing a course begins with the key question: What do you want students to know, value or be able to do by the end of the term? Your course level learning outcomes provide the answer to this question, giving your course purpose and communicating clear expectations to students. Learning outcomes also provide you as the instructor with a North star that you can always return to as you’re weaving the many interconnected parts of a course together in your course syllabus.  

By beginning with learning outcomes, this “backward design approach (Wiggins & McTighe 2005) can be an effective planning strategy to create a clear road map of the direction and connection of all teaching, learning, and assessment activities in the course for both you and your students. Ways to implement this approach include:

  • Use guiding tools like taxonomies of learning to explore which action verbs and levels of understanding best connect with the goals of your course. Many find Bloom’s Taxonomy an excellent entry point into creating and refining your learning outcomes. Other taxonomies, such as Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning, might better reflect the desired learning in your course.  

  • Consider where your course sits within the overall program of study to help you decide what learning outcomes are essential and how they are contextualized by the knowledge, values and skills students have entering the course and which are needed to advance to the next level.

  • Explore ways to scaffold learning in your course by creating learning outcomes that are measurable and observable for accurate assessment to support students moving from one learning outcome onto the next.

Constructive Alignment

John Biggs discusses course design as an interconnected framework where all components of course design – learning outcomes, assessments and feedback, and teaching and in-class learning activities – inform one another called “constructive alignment”. The interconnection between the components of course design allow students to better understand the purpose of the course, what happens in the classroom and how their understanding will be assessed. In practice, this could look like:

  • Learning Outcome: By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and label the physical aspects of the human circulatory system.

  • Teaching and Learning Activities: After reading the assigned text chapter and listening to a lecture that includes mnemonic devices, students work in small groups to accurately label each aspect of the circulatory system without looking at the notes or materials. Students then evaluate strengths and gaps in knowledge using notes and materials to provide feedback for focused learning. 

  • Assessment: Students complete the labels of randomly selected structures of the human circulatory system on an exam without reference material.

Your student’s ability to successfully accomplish the assessment then provides evidence of the student’s ability to master the corresponding learning outcome.

Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a pedagogical framework that enhances accessible learning and creates more equitable opportunities for academic success (Kumar and Wideman 2014). UDL encourages instructors to proactively address barriers to learning by multiplying the pathways by which students can successfully achieve set course learning outcomes. The UDL guidelines include ways to multiply the representation of the course materials, multiply the approaches to student motivation and sustained learning, and multiply the paths to express learning. 

We can redesign the above constructive alignment example with a UDL approach:

  • Learning Outcome: By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and label the physical aspects of the human circulatory system.

  • Activity: After reading a chapter or watching a video with the same information, and listening to or reading subtitles from a lecture, students work in small groups or individually (depending on preference) to accurately label each aspect of the circulatory system first without and then with reference materials.

  • Assessment: Students choose to either complete the exam or provide evidence of their ability through a guided video identifying and labeling the physical aspects of the circulatory system. Alternatively, students could create an artistic representation, or develop their own PowerPoint presentation. Assessments should provide evidence of success on a learning outcome – but the path to do this can vary.

Finalizing Your Syllabus

Try focusing on one change per course iteration rather than changing everything all at once. This allows for evaluation and revision through your teaching career.

While finalizing your course syllabus, considering how you design your course is just as important as what you choose to teach. Through exploring different course design processes, you can determine which design structure works best for you and your students’ success.

As a further support for instructors in completing course syllabi for the upcoming academic year, the TEI Team is offering its Course Design Certificate at both the Waterloo and Brantford campuses. This two-day certificate provides a practical learning experience to guide you as you build, update, and finalize courses.

 

 

 

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