Dee Fink has licensed Linda Jacoby through her company, Optimize Learning, to offer online short-courses that will allow teachers anywhere in the world to learn how to design courses for greater student engagement and better student learning.
Online Short-Courses on “Significant Learning By Design”
These courses help teachers learn how to use Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning and his principles of Integrated Course design. There are now two courses for achieving this goal:
Significant Learning By Design I – This one guides participants through the basics of learning-centered course design: A consideration of Situational Factors; articulating your special vision of significant learning; using the Taxonomy to develop a set of course-level learning outcomes; and from this, identifying related learning and assessment activities for each kind of learning.
Significant Learning by Design II – This course builds on the first course by: Developing desired outcomes, learning activities, and assessment activities for each major unit in the course; selecting a good Teaching Strategy; incorporating Active Learning and Educative Assessment; building a Rich Learning Activity; identifying an appropriate Culminating Activity; and making sure the course is functionally and chronologically integrated.
How They Operate: Both courses are offered at multiple times each year and last 2 weeks. Participants sign up for whichever offering they want and will join others in a cohort of participants that will not be larger than 20 people.
Special Features:
- Each course is led by an experienced Mentor who gives feedback on each major assignment to each participant.
- These courses are also NOT of the “read & test” variety of online courses. The activities for each section are: “read, do an application assignment, get feedback from the Mentor, and learn from other course participants”.
Two Certificates for Course I: Participants can earn two certificates from this course.
- The “Certificate of Completion” will be awarded to everyone who finishes all the units in the course.
- The “Certificate of Performance”: After they finish this course, participants can submit their full set of materials to a reviewer, who will decide how well they meet DF&A’s “6 Standards of Excellence” for good course design. This second certificate verifies that they have not only learned about course design, but that they can do it.
- Since this Certificate requires someone to review the full set of course design materials, there is a fee of $100 for this.
Cost: The cost for each of the two courses is $395 per person.
For Further Information: You can find further information about this general course at the following website: http://www.optimizelearning.org