Backward Course Research Articles

Development of a U.S./U.K. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) partnership for undergraduate education in public health

Preparing future public health (U.S.) or health and social care (U.K.) professionals for international settings is imperative in today’s higher education landscape. Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is an innovative form of virtual exchange (VE) that provides students with international experience, cultural competence, and an understanding of global healthcare needs. This practice report summarizes how two universities in the U.S. and U.K. co-developed a COIL unit for their public health and health and social care students to learn about international healthcare systems. Public health faculty used SUNY COIL planning strategies and backward course design to guide the planning of the COIL unit. The learning processes and outcomes were designed to support program and campus learning outcomes that align with domain areas required by the Council on Education for Public Health. The planning process, curriculum, and technology used for the COIL unit are outlined. Evaluation of the unit included achieving student learning outcomes at the course, program, and campus levels; changes in intercultural awareness based on the Intercultural Knowledge and Competence VALUE Rubric; benefits to students, research assistants, and faculty; and alignment with the qualities of VE.

Nationally endorsed learning objectives to improve course design in introductory biology.

Introductory biology for majors is one of the most consequential courses in STEM, with annual enrollments of several hundred thousand students in the United States alone. To support increased student success and meet current and projected needs for qualified STEM professionals, it will be crucial to redesign majors biology by using explicit learning objectives (LOs) that can be aligned with assessments and active learning exercises. When a course is designed in this way, students have opportunities for the practice and support they need to learn, and instructors can collect the evidence they need to evaluate whether students have mastered key concepts and skills. Following an iterative process of review, revision, and evaluation, which included input from over 800 biology instructors around the country, we produced a nationally endorsed set of lesson-level LOs for a year-long introductory biology for major's course. These LOs are granular enough to support individual class sessions and provide instructors with a framework for course design that is directly connected to the broad themes in Vision and Change and the general statements in the BioCore and BioSkills Guides. Instructors can implement backward course design by aligning these community endorsed LOs with daily and weekly learning activities and with formative and summative assessments.

Instructional Insights: Building Well Aligned Courses Using Performance-Based Backward Design

This paper describes an example of collaborative course development, in which occupational therapy faculty members designed a two-course sequence for teaching content related to occupational therapy with children and youth. They used a backward course design approach and performance-based learning objectives to create alignment between Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education (ACOTE) standards, course assignments and instructional content. The authors present examples from their course design, along with evidence-based resources to guide educators working on developing new courses or revising existing courses. Outcomes achieved from four years of teaching and refining the developed courses are also described.

Using backward design to create a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive principles course

The economics profession has been working to become more open, inclusive, and welcoming. The introductory principles of economics courses provide a unique opportunity to teach students of the wider university the value of the field of economics. It is in this setting that instructors’ interactions with students show them a welcoming and diverse profession or confirm that economics provides a toolbox useful only to some. Using a careful backward course design and attention to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment, the following article’s author presents a principles of microeconomics course with the potential to illustrate to undergraduate students the value of a degree in economics for all students.

Significant learning in introductory macroeconomics: Addressing misconceptions about “others”

Misconceptions hinder optimal student learning. They need to be addressed explicitly and formally to achieve effective teaching of economics. The author of this article outlines an activity that is designed to address misconceptions about “others” using a backward course design framework. Fink’s significant learning categories, specifically human dimension, and caring, are used to create learning outcomes that target misconceptions. The Predict-Observe-Explain teaching strategy is used to translate these learning outcomes into learning activities.

Using STEAM and Bio-Inspired Design to Teach the Entrepreneurial Mindset to Engineers

AbstractThe need for addressing global and societal problems is stronger than ever, as demonstrated by the UN Sustainable Development Goals and National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges. However, engineering undergraduate students rarely get to experience engaging with the associated real-world projects and challenges. This has the potential to result in attenuation from engineering education and career pathways. This study aimed to overcome this issue by reaching the United States’ untapped future engineering workforce via an engineering educator professional development “train-the-trainer” program. This train-the-trainer program guided engineering educators to apply evidence-based pedagogical methods (e.g., backward course design) to couple entrepreneurial mindset (EM) development with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math) and bio-inspired design in an effort to improve the retention of underrepresented engineering students via a transdisciplinary, humanistic approach. This study employed a mixed methods approach including retrospective post-then-pre items based on perceived learning gains, rating the overall satisfaction with the program, and open-ended questions to better understand what went well, what did not go so well, and what can be improved. From a practical perspective, this study shows that integrating STEAM (with a specific focus on the arts) into the engineering classroom promotes problem-solving and critical thinking across disciplines. Here, applying STEAM principles encourages diverse perspective taking and making by bridging paradigms and theoretical frameworks across a variety of humanities and technical disciplines. As a result, combining STEAM with bio-inspired design and the EM has the capacity to increase engagement and broaden participation among students traditionally underrepresented in engineering, including females and minoritized populations.

Pre-modernist Elements in the Origin of Basque and Catalonian Nationalism

Pre-modernist Elements in the Origin of Basque and Catalonian Nationalism Mikel Lorenzo-Arza The removal of poet Antonio de Trueba's (1819–1889) mortal remains from Mallona Cemetery and their reburial at San Vicente Church was quite the occasion in 1920s Bilbao. The impact of the event was due to Trueba's importance in the history of the city, but no less to the Modernist swan sculpted by Mariano Benlliure (1819–1889) to adorn the new altar tomb (Díez Patón 93–108). Even after the closing ceremonies at Arriaga Theatre, it was the swan that lived on in the collective memory, as a subtle artistic reference to Antonio de Trueba's desire to embellish his fellow citizens' lives, much as the Pre-Raphaelite painters wished to do for their Victorian counterparts. Bilbao's industrialists shared the Victorians' economically liberal and socially conservative roots, as well as the desire to consolidate their "leisure class" status, to use Thomas Veblen's term for the founders of the mining emporia built in the wake of the Second Industrial Revolution (1851–1890) (10). In its emulation of the aristocracy (25), Bilbao's industrial bourgeoisie needed to refine its economic power by acquiring artistic assets (25). Writer Vicente Arana (1848–1890), cousin to Sabino Arana Goiri (1865–1903), and Antonio de Trueba's foremost disciple, perceived their need for ennoblement. He depicted the pantheon of Basque regional literary heroes as a chivalrous world where industrialists could claim kinship with the parientes mayores and their traditions.1 He afforded them a repertoire of literary models through which to establish themselves as a distinct group during the Restoration (1876–1917). This article dissects Vicente Arana's broader project by analyzing his two Pre-Raphaelite novels, Jaun Zuría o el caudillo blanco (1887) and Leyendas del Norte [End Page 113] (1890), and their impact on the development of early Basque nationalism (1892–1900) (Juaristi, Bucle 12-389).2 The movement's founder, Sabino Arana, published Bizkaya por la independencia (1892) in a pre-Modernist atmosphere that flattered his initial conjectures about the "Nordic" ancestry of the Basque people and their need to extricate themselves from their Latin bondage.3 We suggest that Vicente Arana's novels played a paradoxical role in the aesthetic casting of the "Basque race" in that environment. On the one hand, the effeminate characters in Jaun Zuría o el caudillo blanco prompted Sabino Arana to call on Basques to protect their manliness and Nordic roots from Spanish "cripples;" and on the other hand, the Vikings in Leyendas del Norte, a compilation of a series of Icelander sagas, imbued the Nordic people, qua social engineering ideal, with a mythical dimension fueled by [End Page 114] Sabino Arana's nationalism. The message was that Basques should proceed with caution in their contact with the Spaniards immigrating to their country. The texts we will be dealing with come from these decades, years characterized by a series of changes that were to have a key impact on the culture medium where Modernism developed: industrialization, positivism and Marxism led to a bourgeois neo-idealism that sought to ward off shabbiness by enshrining aesthetic formulations from the past. Vicente Arana's novels heralded part of the Modernist desire to avoid vulgarity in everyday life. Sabino Arana's Basque nationalism, in turn, shared with Modernism the exaltation of indigenous features, charting a backward course to times long gone to reinstate a "paradise" eclipsed by the present. In Modernism, the desire to return to a legendary and/or historic past alternated with a kind of populism whose roots sank deep into the timelessness of the nation, an idea we could identify with the notion of intra-history put forward by Miguel de Unamuno in En torno al casticismo (1895). This article also explores the interrelationship between Catalonian nationalism and this same intellectual environment, which preluded what Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958) and José Nogales (1860–1908) christened "Modernism," and encouraged Basque and Catalonian nationalism to institute their racial projects. Víctor Balaguer's (1824–1901) Cuentos de mi tierra (1865), with its depiction of a vigorous, expanding Catalonian race, was linked to the later...

How do graduate students approach college teaching? Influences of professional development, teaching assistantships, and Big Five personality traits

IntroductionGraduate students engage in college teaching with varied attitudes and approaches. Their teaching practices may be influenced by professional development experiences related to pedagogy, and their personality traits.MethodsThrough an online survey of graduate students teaching undergraduate courses (N = 109, 69.7% women, M age = 30 years, 59% psychology), we examined whether self-reported participation in professional development related to pedagogy, teaching assistantship (TA) experience, academic discipline (psychology vs. other), and Big Five personality traits were associated with variation in teaching practices.ResultsParticipation in professional development correlated positively with years of undergraduate teaching experience and with the trait of openness. Hierarchical regressions indicated that professional development served to promote student-focused practices and discouraged lecturing, while TA experience (mostly restricted to psychology instructors) promoted lecturing and discouraged a student-focused approach. Regarding academic discipline, psychology instructors gave higher endorsements to an information transmission, teacher-focused approach to teaching, lectured more, and were less likely to provoke debate than instructors of other disciplines. Such differences may be attributed in part to larger enrollments of psychology courses. Regarding personality traits, both openness and agreeableness were associated with some student-focused practices, while conscientiousness was associated with an information transmission, teacher-focused approach and with practices aligned with backward course design.DiscussionIn light of previous evidence that personality traits are malleable, graduate training programs may want to cultivate traits like openness as a means of encouraging graduate students to reflect on their pedagogy and seek ways to improve their teaching through professional development. Relatedly, graduate programs should aim to support students’ participation in professional development related to pedagogy and, in doing so, communicate its value.

Design Online Project-Base Learning for Learning to Write Scientific Works in Arts and Culture Education

The purpose of this study is to design a project-based learning model specifically for academic writing in the field of arts and culture in the Scientific Writing course. This research is in the form of learning design research. The design model adopted is a Backward Course Design, the model is designed by positioning the learning outcomes as the starting point for preparing the design. Data analysis was carried out by reviewing teaching material documents and learning model syntax. The design results obtained based on the phases are (1) the real form of learning outcomes in the form of articles in national scientific journals, (2) an evaluation method for assessing process performance and two forms of assessing project results, and (3) an instructional methodology that combines project-based learning syntax, syntax learning academic writing, and lecture syntax for 16 meetings. The resulting learning design is a best practice recommendation to support the teaching of cultural arts academic writing, especially for online learning.

Using Backward Course Design to Create the Next Generation of Nurse Educator Leaders.

The use of backward design is an effective strategy to create innovative and transformative programs. This article describes the use of backward design to create an effective graduate program to prepare nurse educators. Two cohorts of graduates provided feedback regarding program outcomes. Respondents were all working in an educator role after graduation, in both clinical and academic settings. Overall, respondents reported agreement in their ability to perform as effective educators in each of the eight National League for Nursing core competencies for nurse educators. This innovative use of backward design has proven effective in educating the next generation of nurse educators to be leaders in a digital world. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2021;52(12):554-557.].

Justice-Forward Course Design

With shifting societal and learner needs, expectations, and experiences, course design must evolve to best support students in both adapting to and creating change. By incorporating the Toward a Liberated Learning Spirit (TALLS) model into backward course design, courses can be designed to encourage intellectual risk-taking and attend to diverse knowledge and ways of knowing that disrupt oppressive and colonizing practices in both content and structure. This article outlines the use of the TALLS model in the backward design of a Native Movement undergraduate course to showcase how courses can be developed for engagement, inclusivity, and active and justice-forward learning.

Teaching with Compassion: Autoethnographies from the front lines of e-learning

In 2020 the landscape of teaching in higher education was forced to change given a global pandemic. As a result there were/are inevitable shifts in how course instructors develop and deliver their courses, as well as how they connect with students. Remote, or distance, learning is not a new phenomenon, and e-learning has been delivered across different institutions of higher education for approximately twenty years. However, scholarship in distance learning is dated and the empirical literature in digital pedagogy has gaps when it comes to best practices for teaching and learning in an online format. This paper highlights the importance of teaching with compassion as it fosters better relationships between instructors and students and helps to build community in learning environments. Relationships facilitate learning, and this is especially important in strained times - such as a higher concentration of online teaching and learning due to a pandemic. The notion of compassionate teaching is described. Using self ethnography and drawing on examples from their own course experiences, the authors present what has worked well in delivering small and large courses online. In particular, the first half of the paper focuses on backward course design, multimedia, accessibility, and forward/backward extensions. The latter half of the paper describes strategies embedded in a course and their positive effects for instructors and learners.

Designing Courses in Communication Sciences and Disorders Using Backward Design

PurposeTo ensure that students are learning the most important information and developing the most important skills and to make certain that any externally mandated standards are met, professors need to intentionally plan their courses. This tutorial will provide a description and comparison of three classes of course design (forward, central, and backward) and two well-regarded frameworks for facilitating efficient and effective backward design (Integrated Design and Understanding by Design). Explanations of key terminology and examples from the redesign of a graduate voice disorders course will be provided.ConclusionsFollowing the Understanding by Design framework for backward course design not only resulted in a well-organized course that facilitated achievement of a learner-centered, knowledge and skill–centered, and assessment-centered environment but also greatly increased the confidence of the instructor and the participation of the students. Intentional course planning can facilitate more efficient and effective learning sessions, resulting in both instructor and student satisfaction. The information provided in this tutorial can be adapted for any communication sciences and disorders course and with any level of faculty experience.

The Two Types of Grades and Why They Matter to Ethics Education

In-course marks and final grades each have their own nature and purpose and conflating the two does a disservice to both. Final grades represent a fixed and final statement about how a student did in the course in the end. They are a communication between the professor and anyone who will pick up that student’s transcript someday. In-course marks, by contrast, are a communication between the professor and student alone, and ought to be representative of an ongoing conversation about how the student is currently doing in the course. They are subject to change with each lecture, assessment, and conversation, and should embody that dynamism and potential for progress. Building upon the pedagogical concepts of differentiated learning, growth mindset, and backward course design, this paper will examine the advantages of differentiating between the two types of grades and present three grading models that incorporate the distinction.

Research for the Three Dimensional Design Education using Backward Design

학습 목표와 평가를 먼저 계획하고 학습 과정과 평가가 이루어지는 백워드 설계모형은 영속적 이해를 통해 주요 개념을 배워 다른 과목이나 생활에 전이할 수 있도록 하는 것을 핵심원리로 여긴다. 이는 창의·융합형 인재와 그에 맞는 역량 강화를 추구하는 2015 개정 교육과정이 추구하는 방향성과 일치한다. 이에 본 연구는 특성화고등학교 입체조형 수업을 백워드 과정으로 설계함으로써 조형의 요소와 원리를 이해하고, 시각적·촉각적으로 재해석하여 재료의 다양한 방법을 통해 창의적으로 표현할 수업방안을 제안하고자 하였다. 이를 위하여 백워드 설계모형과 입체조형에 대한 이론적 고찰과 선행연구를 하고, 설문조사를 하여 입체조형 교육의 현황을 조사하였다. 이를 바탕으로 특성화고등학교 디자인과 2학년 학생을 대상으로 7단계로 구성된 ‘조형원리를 이용한 입체 조명등 제작’ 수업을 시행하였으며, 수업 후 효과검증을 위해 수업참여 학생들을 대상으로 5점 척도로 설문조사를 진행하였다. 그 결과, 만족도 평균 4.1, 난이도는 3.96, 적합성 등의 유익함은 3.95로 전반적인 수업의 만족도가 높았고 수업과정과 결과물도 만족스러운 수준으로 효과성을 입증하였다.Backward design the purpose and evaluation of learning are planned in advance and then the learning process and evaluation is performed think considers to learn main concept by permanent understanding and transfer it to other subject or life as a core principle. It is correspond with the direction of revised education course of 2015 pursuing creative and fusion person of talent and strengthen the ability meets it. So, the class plan expressing creatively through various method of three dimensional materials by visual and tactile reinterpretation understanding the element and principle of the design by designing the three dimensional design class in specialized high school as backward course is suggested. To achieve this, the theoretical consideration and advanced research for backward design and three dimensional design is performed and researched the state of three dimensional design education by the survey. Based on it, Three dimensional lighting production using design principle composed with 7 steps to the 2nd year students of design department of specialized high school was performed and processed the survey with five-point scale to the students participated the class to verify the effect after the class. As the result, overall satisfaction of the class was high with 4.1 in average satisfaction, 3.96 in level of difficulty and 3.95 in the usefulness such as suitability and proved the effectiveness of class process and result as satisfactory.

Excellence in the Design and Delivery of an Online Global Health Survey Course: A Roadmap for Educators

The release of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2016, the growing use of online delivery formats for public health education, and the urgent need to train an expanding global health workforce all reflect the need to adopt best practices in the design and delivery of online global health courses. The purpose of this coaching article is to share peer-to-peer strategies and best practices for developing a global health survey course for online delivery. Important elements for consideration include the use of a backward design approach, global health competency review and selection, the scope and sequencing of key content areas, meaningful assessments of competency mastery, the development of authentic learning strategies, the potential use of open educational resources, and strategies for ongoing course evaluation and refinement. A backward course design, with well-selected content domains and competencies, opens the way for the development of the best possible learning experiences that are consistent with national benchmarks for online course development. The use of this strategy has resulted in a much keener sense of course “ownership” on our part, along with enhanced learning experiences and satisfaction for students.

Collaborative curricular (re)construction - Tracking faculty and student learning impacts and outcomes five years later

The Collaborative Curricular (re)Construction, or C3, was an initiative at Creighton University that paired faculty (academics) and students in a process of backward course design, in two cohorts, in the 2013/14 and 2014/15 academic years. Faculty/student pairs worked over the span of a year to redesign a course within their discipline; courses ranged from theory-, skill-, and laboratory-based courses. The study investigated four primary questions: 
 (1) Was C3 an effective tool for faculty development?
 (2) Did students emerge from the C3 experience changed as learners? 
 (3) Did the course revisions result in increased student learning in subsequent course offerings?
 (4) Did the effects of the C3 workgroup affect curriculum as well as the culture within the program or department?
 Previous work has described the immediate impact to faculty and student; here, however, findings include the long-term impact on faculty and on student learning in the redesigned courses. Results conclude that even a brief faculty/student collaborative redesign experience has lasting impacts on student learning and, in several cases, on program-wide curriculum.

Teaching About Celebrity and Philanthropy: A Case Study of Backward Course Design

The nonprofit sector has expanded significantly over the last few decades. At the same time, celebrity culture has received a new level of media attention. To introduce students to philanthropy while providing new knowledge to philanthropy majors, we developed Celebrity Philanthropy, a course at the intersection of celebrity, social media, popular culture, fundraising, and philanthropy. We used the backward design curricular model in which learning objectives are determined first and assessments and instructional strategies are conceived subsequently. Using case study methodology, we drew on a variety of qualitative and quantitative data points to examine (1) the nature of student learning in Celebrity Philanthropy and (2) whether the assessment approaches and instructional strategies helped students to achieve the course learning objectives. The assessments and comments indicate that the learning outcomes were met and that student knowledge about celebrity, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector increased. We discovered two main challenges. First, instructors did not always achieve balance between exploring a subfield of philanthropy and placing it in the larger context of philanthropy in society, and second, too much curricular and pedagogical experimentation hindered the cohesiveness of the course. We encourage other instructors to use lessons learned from this study to consider the intersection of celebrity and philanthropy as an avenue for teaching philanthropy/nonprofit concepts, to adopt formalized models for course design, and to take an integrated approach in structuring learning opportunities and pedagogical strategies. As a field, we also need to conduct more research about celebrity philanthropy and to contribute more frequently to the public dialogue on this topic. Subscribe to JNEL

The Effects and the Development of Backward Course Design in the ‘Biology and Environment’ Classes of the Elementary School

The Effects and the Development of Backward Course Design in the ‘Biology and Environment’ Classes of the Elementary School

A Planning Tool for Incorporating Backward Design, Active Learning, and Authentic Assessment in the College Classroom

ABSTRACTBackward course design is a compelling strategy for achieving results-based, student-centered learning. The backward course-design approach is first to identify student-learning outcomes, then the means of assessing the outcomes, and lastly the classroom activities that would support the learning outcomes. With demonstrated success at improving teaching and learning at K–12 levels, this design approach is receiving increasing attention at the college level. Yet college faculty, who receive comparatively little instruction in course design, may find it challenging to enact the principles of backward course design into day-to-day lecture planning. To help address this challenge, we developed a backward design-inspired lesson planner to assist in restructuring college course periods for more active, learner-centered activities that align with course goals. We describe the planner and its application to a non-majors college biology class, and we share student and instructor perceptions of classroom structure and use of classroom time before and after implementation. Benefits of implementing the backward design planner included enhanced ability to prioritize content delivery to students, better time management in and out of the classroom, improved experience of lecture preparation, more engaged students, and more frequent feedback on student comprehension.