Courses

Course (What)

A course is a structured collection of topics organized around a central theme (e.g., Chemistry, Algebra, Critical Thinking) and designed to achieve specific goals that define what a learner will know and be able to do upon completion.

Analysis (Breakdown)

Theme and Topics

In this context, a theme is the central focus (e.g., Statistics) and topics are a breakdown of things to learn. For example, here are some topics in Statistics: dataset, R, mean, standard deviation, probability, Venn diagram, p-value, and so on.

Goal

A goal is a desired future condition or conditions that an actor (individual or group) intends to achieve and is actively working towards through purposeful actions.

Knowledge

Knowledge is useful and accurate information that a learner remembers and applies in the real world because it has been meaningfully encoded into their long-term memory through understanding, practice, and retrieval.

Performance

Performance is the ability to do something well as measured by high levels of quality for the learner’s context.

Examples

  1. A high school or college chemistry course.
  2. A welding class at a community college.
  3. A third-grade math class.
  4. An online course on computer programming.
  5. A SCUBA course.

Rationale

A well-designed course makes learning engaging, effective, and efficient—maximizing enjoyment and competence while minimizing drawbacks like cost, time, and frustration.

If you want your own learning to be deeply enjoyable and highly effective, you can design your own courses to guide your progress or you can find courses that have been designed and built well and use these.

Beyond personal learning, many of us teach in both formal and informal settings—whether guiding children, managing teams, coaching, mentoring, leading, or simply helping friends and family.

In these teaching contexts, strong course design skills create engaging, effective learning experiences with minimal effort on your part once the course is built.

Excellent Courses (How To)

  1. Figure out the goals.

    • Knowledge: What will the learner be able to explain, teach, apply, and remember?

    • Performance: What will the learner be able to do? Why are these things worthwhile in the real world?

    • Criteria: Ensure that the goals are worthwhile, challenging, and attainable given the learner’s context.

  2. Figure out the topics.

    • Identify the key topics needed to reach the goals.

    • Break them down into small, manageable steps based on the learner’s current level of knowledge and performance.

  3. Effectively organize the topics.

    • Prioritize topics that the learner can apply immediately rather than in some distant future.

    • Sequence the topics in a natural learning progression from novice → beginner → intermediate → advanced → and so on.

  4. Figure out tasks with feedback.

    • Design useful, real-world tasks that allow the learner to practice.

    • Ensure tasks come with rich feedback that guides improvements in knowledge and performance.

  5. Figure out how you will measure learning.

    • Define ways for the learner and teacher to track progress.

    • Make sure the assessment aligns with the goals and tasks so that it actually measures what matters.

  6. Build the course.

    • Develop the topics, the delivery system, the tasks-with-feedback, and the measurement system into a working structure.

  7. Apply the course.

    • Use the course for your own learning or to guide others.

  8. Apply Reflective-Thinking (RT).

    • Improve the course each time you use it based on experience and feedback.