Constructive alignment is a core principle of educational design. It ensures that you design courses, materials, activities and curricula with which your students can achieve the learning objectives you set out for them.
In order to formulate clear and measurable learning objectives, you should make use of verbs from Bloom’s taxonomy. Because the verbs are organised across five cognitive levels, this also helps you with aligning your activities and assessment to your objectives.
Consult the learning objectives guidelines for more information and instruction on how to formulate learning objectives, as well as an overview of Bloom’s taxonomy verbs in Dutch and English. You can also use the learning objective generator as inspiration.
Once you have defined your learning objectives, you can think about teaching and learning activities that can help your students achieve them. Use this teaching activity overview as a starting point. There are different filters you can use to tailor the activity to your needs. You can also select the level of Bloom from your objective to find an activity on the same level.
Before designing your own materials, it is also useful to consult open educational resources. These are materials other lecturers or didactic staff have created and made available to use in higher education. You can access the resources through the University Library.
If you want to support students in developing their skills in your course, you can integrate relevant modules of the Science Skills Platform into your materials. Contact skills@science.leidenuniv.nl for support.
Different types of assessment are suitable for different levels of learning objectives. If you want students to be able to apply their knowledge to a novel context after a course, you should not only test their knowledge with some factual multiple choice questions.
Providing regular feedback is also beneficial to students’ learning process. You can provide feedback yourself or use peer-feedback activities to stimulate students’ critical thinking.
When designing education it can always help to see what other people are doing. You can have a look at the teaching support website for some general inspiration for innovative education.
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