Course outline template: modules, outcomes and assessments

When to use it

• A new college or continuing-education course that needs outcomes and a module plan before the syllabus
• Online and self-paced courses, where the modules carry the structure a live class would
• Writing workshops, bootcamps and training programs that run over several weeks
• Course proposals and program reviews that ask how each outcome is taught and assessed

How to use this template

1. Write the outcomes before the modules

   Start with what students will be able to do when the course ends, not with the topics you want to cover. Write each outcome as one sentence built on a verb you could watch someone do: draft, revise, compare, design, explain. This is backward design, the order Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe argued for in Understanding by Design (1998): results first, then the evidence, then the teaching. Three to five outcomes cover most courses of six to ten weeks. A list of twelve is usually a topic list in disguise.

2. Turn the topics into modules

   Group the material into modules of one to three weeks, and give each a title that says what students do in it: "Write the scene," not "Scene." Fill in the Outcomes column of the module map as you go. Every module should serve at least one outcome, and the last one usually serves all of them.

3. Give every outcome an assessment

   Fill in the assessment table next. An outcome with no assessment has no evidence behind it, and an assessment with no outcome raises the question of why it is graded. Let the weights follow importance: a final project that shows every outcome deserves more of the grade than a reading quiz.

4. Run the alignment check, then build the rest

   Work through the checklist at the end of the outline. Once it passes, the outline is the stable core of the course. The syllabus adds this term's dates, office hours and room on top of it, and the catalog entry or course page borrows the description and outcomes. Download the .docx for a committee or co-teachers who work in Word, or the Markdown file for a plain-text editor or notes app.

Course outline vs. syllabus

The two names overlap, and institutions use them differently. At most American colleges the syllabus is the document students get on the first day, and the course outline is the plan underneath it. At some universities, UNSW Sydney among them, "course outline" is the name of the student-facing document itself. California's community colleges keep a formal course outline of record for each credit course, and state regulations (Title 5, section 55002) list what it must specify, from unit value and contact hours to objectives, content, assignments and methods of evaluation.

This template ends with short Materials and Policies sections so it can stand alone for a workshop or an online course. For a credit course with a separate syllabus, move those two sections there and keep the outline to outcomes, modules and assessments.

Write outcomes you can assess

An outcome says what a student can do at the end, in a form someone else could check. "Understand," "appreciate" and "be familiar with" fail that test, since nobody can watch appreciation happen. The usual source of better verbs is the revised Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson and Krathwohl, 2001), whose six levels run remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. Pick the verb for the level the course actually reaches. A course that ends in a portfolio reaches create. A course that ends in a multiple-choice exam rarely gets past apply, whatever its outcomes claim.

Course outcomes and module objectives are two sizes of the same idea. Many teaching centers call the course-level statements outcomes and the smaller module-level steps objectives, although plenty of people use the words interchangeably. "Write a 750-word scene in the present tense" is a step toward "draft a personal essay." Tag each objective with the outcome it serves, as the template does with (CLO 2), and the module map nearly fills itself in.

The test that matters is whether the outcome, the activity and the assessment ask for the same thing. John Biggs, whose Teaching for Quality Learning at University is built on the idea, calls this constructive alignment. If the outcome says "revise" and the only assessment is a quiz on revision terms, students will learn the terms.

Course outline example: an eight-week essay course

An online, non-credit course for adult writers: one 90-minute live session a week plus about three hours of reading and writing. The course is invented, and it has the shape of the illustration at the top of this page: three outcomes, five modules, and a final module that covers all three.

A few choices are visible from the map alone. Module 1 has no graded work, so students can write badly in week one without it costing them. Module 2 is the essayist's version of show, don't tell, and Module 3 is its counterweight: reflection gets a week of its own because it is what turns an anecdote into an essay. The workshop sits in weeks 5 and 6, late enough that everyone has a full draft and early enough to leave two weeks for revision.

Budget the hours per module

Outcomes decide what goes in. Hours decide whether it fits. Add up what each module asks of students, live time plus reading, writing and practice, and compare it with the weekly time promised at the top of the outline. A module that asks for eight hours in a course that promised four gets skimmed, and the part that gets skipped is usually the reading.

Credit-bearing courses in the US have a federal yardstick. The Department of Education defines a credit hour as at least one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction plus a minimum of two hours of out-of-class work each week, for about fifteen weeks for a semester hour or ten to twelve weeks for a quarter hour. For a semester course, that works out as follows.

For a non-credit course, run the same arithmetic with your own numbers: the example above is 8 weeks at 4.5 hours, or 36 hours. Then time a module by doing its work yourself, and assume students will need longer. You wrote the materials.

Where course outlines go wrong

• The topic list is the outline. Twelve weeks named after textbook chapters say what you will cover, not what students will be able to do. Write the outcomes first and let the topics settle into modules around them.
• Too many outcomes. If every week has its own course outcome, those are module objectives. Merge them into a few that the final assessment can show.
• An outcome nobody assesses. Often the one about collaboration or ethics. Add a task that produces evidence, or move the line into the description.
• The verb and the task disagree. An outcome that says "design," tested by a multiple-choice exam. Change the task or change the verb.
• No time to use feedback. A capstone due the week after the last new material leaves students no room to revise. End new content a module or two before the course does.

Once the outline holds up, the other course documents grow out of it. The syllabus template adds the term's dates and policies, and each module breaks down into class sessions with the lesson plan template. For a single day rather than a whole course, use the workshop outline template instead.