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Writer's pictureDr. Deepessh Divaakaran

4 questions that will lead to effective course planning

As a faculty, your primary goal is to develop effective lesson plan. Here we present the simple tool to design the lesson plan for your courses by just asking 4 broad questions.

A lesson plan is the instructor’s road map of what students need to learn and how it will be done effectively during the class time. Before you plan your lesson, you will first need to identify the learning objectives for the class meeting. Then, you can design appropriate learning activities and develop strategies to obtain feedback on student learning. Here I present simple method to design an effective course planning, by just asking 4 basic question. Here is the method below:



WHO? Who are the learners?


Successful instructional planning requires understanding the learning characteristics and needs of the students:

  • Student Intelligence: This is determined by measuring the past performance of students, soft skills, other hard skills required for the particular courses.

  • Student Psyche: What are the circumstances of their environment? Including frustrations, relationships and skill level.


WHAT? What are learners suppose to learn?


Successful instructional planning what contents are promised in the syllabus and what type of students you have:

  • Course / Course Type: The course is offered in which semester/year and is the course Elective or mandatory.

  • Syllabus: Syllabus are set of broad contents the ubniversity has recommended to be taught to learners. And how much workload / credits are alloted for the course.

  • Pre Requisites: Faculty decides the skills required to learn this course. This can be done using Curriculum Map*.

  • Student Demography: Faculty need to understand the demography of the student to ensure effective course delivery.


WHY? Why learning this course is important?


Define the benefits students will receive from the learning course. Consistently weave the messages throughout your course:

  • Real world skills: Determine how many real world skills will be learned by students once the course is completed. The skills may be either hard skills or soft skills

  • Knowledge skills: Faculty will determine what type of knowledge will be learned by the student. There are four types of knowledge like Factual, Conceptual, Procedural and Meta Cognitive.

  • Student Demography: As per the knowledge levels determined and skills attained, faculty will define Course Outcome for the subject. The course outcome are defined based on Cognitive Level like Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyse, Evaluae and Remember.


HOW? How can the learner best learn the subject or skill?


This question and all its components will help you formulate ideas regarding the most effective strategies and best method to use for presenting the course material:

  • Instructional Plan: Faculty will try to structure and sequence the events of instruction, and then create conditions that foster learning. Mainly Instructional plan consists of Teaching Mode, Cognitive level, Activities required, Assessment required and feedback process to be used.

  • Assessments: Faculty need to devise the assessment as per the demanded by the course outcome and the level of cognition learners are supposed to reach.

  • Attainment: Finally, faculty will determine the attainment of the course by understanding the assessment performance and in turn understanding the course outcome attainment.

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