Provide clear expectations and explicit course learning goals to foster student success.
Design courses with learning goals and measurable outcomes that align with departmental and programmatic expectations and course level. These goals and objectives will guide your selection of course content and assignments and assessments. Well-designed and aligned courses ensure that courses are transparent, enabling all students to understand a course’s value and the route to course success.
This page provides guidance and templates for what instructors need to do to prepare to teach each semester. Clear is a deceptive word. It appears simple to be clear, for when a course, assignment, or sentence is clear, it’s effortless for readers to follow. However being clear is difficult as it requires writers – instructors – to anticipate questions that may never be asked.
To learn more about the current and past OFE programs, visit our Teaching Development page >>>
Plan Your Course
Using backward design ensures the essentials of a strong course: learning outcomes, a course outline, assignments, assessments, and learning activities.
Write Your Syllabus
Effective syllabi communicate essential information about the course and instructor, learning objectives, required materials, and assessments, and course calendar.
Create Assignments and Assessments
Refresh and expand your repertoire of strategies for supporting student learning through varied assignments and assessments.
Choosing Course Materials
Advice for choosing course materials that support diversity and inclusion, and using course reserves and open educational resources.
Designing Your Online Course
Online modalities require a more fully developed Canvas course and more attention to organization, clarity, technological integration, and accessibility, as well as some different approaches to engaging in active learning.
Planning a Compressed Course
Compressed or accelerated courses need special attention to course design to ensure a robust course that is manageable for both students and instructor.
Plan for Grading
Develop a strategy for grading that leverages grades to maximize learning without putting yourself into an impossible workload situation.
Academic Honesty
Strategies to cope with academic dishonesty begin with the course and assignment design but do not end there: review suggested practices as you design your course.
Practical Responses to Generative AI
ChatGPT and other AI present new challenges and opportunities for teaching and learning.
Attendance
Options and considerations as you develop your attendance policy and respond to special situations.
Plan for Disruption
Making a plan for disruption saves stress later.
Student Support Resources
Use campus resources to connect students with academic and other support offered by campus partners.
Canvas Universal Guidelines
Information about what all courses must include on Canvas.
Instructor Essentials
Information about University resources and policies relating to teaching that every instructor will need to use.
For more information or help on any of these topics, please email the Office for Faculty Excellence or make an appointment with a consultant.
7.6.23 CK
Teaching Resources by Montclair State University Office for Faculty Excellence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license and may be subject to additional intellectual property notices, information, or restrictions. You are solely responsible for obtaining permission to use third party content or determining whether your use is fair use and for responding to any claims that may arise.