Course Intent and Alignment

The alignment between the essential intent of the course, learning objectives, learning activities and learner assessment guides your designing work to ensure a meaningful learning experience. When these course components are properly aligned you know that you are teaching the content that you need to be teaching, that you are providing learners with meaningful activities that create opportunities to practice concepts learned and, most importantly, that you are assessing only content that has been covered and with which students have had an opportunity to interact.

Without this alignment you might teach topics that are not necessary, provide activities that are irrelevant to the learning process and, more gravely, you might assess learners on topics that may not have necessarily been covered. The latter can cause serious issues with learner motivation and engagement as well as administrative chaos as learners may challenge exam results or final grades... and rightfully so.

This chapter focuses on determining the essential intent for a course and aligning the various course components. If you are adapting an existing course for online or blended delivery, you may want to go through the course content to check for alignment between the objectives, activities and assessment. This may be the time to make some changes and improve on what already exists!