Here are a few templates and tools that can be used by a faculty member who either does not have the resources of an instructional designer at hand or merely chooses not to work with an instructional designer. The core standard for a well-designed course is the alignment of the objectives with the course assessments, learning activities and learning materials.

The central pieces of course are the learning objectives. That is where course design begins and against which course outcomes are measured.

This location is interactive and can actually help you build measurable learning objectives for your course based on Bloom’s Taxonomy! www.radiojames.com/ObjectivesBuilder

Mager’s Tips on Learning Objectives. This site includes my favorite “cheat sheet” for writing objectives: the list of observable verbs! There are two lists: one for the cognitive domain and one for the affective domain:
www2.gsu.edu/~mstmbs/CrsTools/Magerobj.html

Once the Learning Objectives are clearly written and measurable, it is amazing how the remaining course design elements will fall into place. In our training sessions designed to prepare faculty members to teach online, we’ve used several templates as guides for faculty to aid in aligning assessments and activities with objectives. Our current version is available here. As a synthesis of many other templates from across the U.S., it may very well look familiar!