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Decision Making in Course Design

Decision making is an important feature of design. Although engineering design refers to the design of products and technical systems, design activities occur in many other professions, including education. As education moves from teaching to learning, engineering faculty are becoming course designers who make many decisions when designing a course. Although many course design processes have been described, previous work has not considered course design as an interrelated set of decisions. To plan a course, a designer must make decisions. The course designer must select following elements: the purposes of the course, the content, its sequence, the instructional resources, and the instructional processes. These decisions occur at different “levels”: some determine “small” parts of the course (such as the media for one activity), and some determine “large” parts of the course (such as the sequence of topics). This paper, an initial step towards decisionbased instructional design, describes the decisions that need to be made to design a typical academic course, the different ways in which these decisions are logically related to each other, and the objectives relevant to these decisions. These descriptions, which focus on the logical relationship between the decisions, do not form a complete course design process. Designing better courses requires selecting better alternatives for the many decisions that must be made. The objectives used to guide these decisions are thus a critical part of course design. These objectives include meeting a specific need in a satisfactory way, using an established rule or heuristic, maximizing effectiveness, optimizing a metric that is correlated with effectiveness, reducing the costs and resources required to develop and offer the course, and maximizing cost-effectiveness. This paper presents a simple model that describes the relationships between the course design, the instructor’s actions, the students’ actions, the initial and recurring costs of a course, the course effectiveness, and the utility (value) of the course. Based on this model, one could formulate a comprehensive instructional design problem: select the course design that maximizes the expected utility (value). Although there may be other factors that should be included in this model and we may currently be far away from formulating and solving this comprehensive instructional design problem, it can serve as a goal to motivate future research. This paper presents a new perspective for understanding course design, and elaborating this view can increase our understanding of engineering education and help those who are designing engineering courses. Describing these steps as decisions is an important step towards helping instructors make better decisions, which can yield more effective course designs and enhance student learning. This paper adds to our knowledge of engineering education by identifying the types of decisions involved and the objectives that can be used to make those decisions. INTRODUCTION Decision making is an important feature of design. Although engineering design refers to the design of products and technical systems, design activities occur in many other professions, including education. As education moves from teaching to learning, university faculty are becoming course designers who make many decisions when designing a course [13]. This paper considers instructional design in general and course design in particular. (Instructional design also includes curriculum design, the design of industrial and military training, and other similar activities. Instructional design is also known by other terms, including “instruction systems design” and “learning systems design.”) Instructional design experts have described a variety of instructional design processes [3-7]. These processes identify the steps needed to design a course. The processes are based on philosophies of learning, empirical knowledge of how people learn, and the practical experience of those who design courses.