Alignment is a core guiding principle in the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric for hybrid, blended, and online courses. Designing a course that exhibits individual components and activities that align with module-level course learning objectives and course-level learning objectives helps students make connections between the things they do in a course and what they should be learning.

With the growing demand for diverse classroom environments—that is, blended, online, hybrid, and so forth— instructors may face the challenge of maintaining their pedagogies when moving from a physical to a virtual classroom. Pedagogy is difficult to maintain in a traditional physical classroom, and the challenge to convey pedagogy in an online environment resides in course design decisions.

To illuminate this challenge, here is a case to consider: I supported an instructor with piloting and teaching her first online course with subject matter centered on dialogue as a transformative practice for educators according to Soka (value-creating) education. The immediate question we considered in designing her course was how her pedagogy—informed and achieved through dialogue in shared physical spaces—could be conveyed and made apparent in an online environment? Since the class contact time was asynchronous, this challenge to have students share space for dialoguing was even more daunting.

Maintaining Pedagogy by Creating Alignment

This underlying question of facilitating dialogical space became the focal goal of the course design, since the instructor’s pedagogical approach was both dialogical and the subject matter also relied heavily on readings and analysis of dialogues, mostly by Daisaku Ikeda, a leading proponent and practitioner of Soka education.

Talk about aligning pedagogy with your subject matter! The readings offered primary sources, models, and philosophy behind dialogue, while the assignments and course activities centered around engaging in actual dialogues with classmates. Assessment activities included guided discussions (dialogues) and written essays reflecting on the dialogues and readings within the course. In other words, a dialogical soka pedagogy was not only affirmed by the instructor, but the course content also enacted her pedagogy through her design.

Alignment in terms of the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric is a central concept for application in course reviews, but the principle suggests a helpful proof for course design and even pedagogy. At its core, alignment assesses the comprehensive strength of a course through the interconnectedness of the course learning outcomes with its module-level learning objectives and individual course components. For a value-creating pedagogy that honors the interconnectedness of mankind via dialogue, alignment was highlighted in the course in many ways: through readings that model dialogues, students engaged in dialogues with each other, and then each student reflected on what they’d experienced in the course with each other (including the instructor) in writing.

Strategies for Course Design with Alignment (and Your Pedagogy)

To apply alignment in a way that propels your pedagogy, consider some takeaways from the above experience in course building:

1. Identify a course overview or “thesis” that encompasses the goal or problem your course seeks to address. Articulating an underlying question to frame your course design, much like a thesis for a research paper, helps an instructor to consider how course components align with one another.
2. Provide explicit connections for your students between course components by using consistent course structures, organization, and instructions. Together, the instructor and I drafted and revised several module-level learning objectives that clearly communicated what course tasks would contribute to specific learning outcomes. The instructor also adopted a module-level structure that was repeated in each module so that the students knew what was expected of them to accomplish within a unit.
3. Consider the macrocosm-microcosm relationship of your entire course or its larger units with individual course components. If ever there was an activity or assignment that the instructor hesitated to include in a module, we revisited the larger course thesis. If that activity did not address the course thesis, we realized it would be tedious and less meaningful to include.
4. Revisit your pedagogy and your learning objectives to help make consistent decisions about content and tools. In the above course, there were several technology tools to choose from for students to do video recording. As such, we made sure to specify what the students were to accomplish for their assignment or activity when choosing the tool, always returning to the module-level learning objective. For example, the instructor wanted assigned pairs of students to conduct an asynchronous dialogue, which meant the tool had to allow for recording, sharing, and commenting on a shared file. Specifying the learning objective components helped the instructor decide on VoiceThread, as the students could asynchronously record and comment on each other’s videos.

Through alignment, the instructor was implicitly engaging the project of value-creating pedagogy because she was invested in creating a space for values to flourish within her course design. Though pedagogies are scarcely unanimous across instructors of diverse fields, values, and praxes, effective course design for online environments can be informed by consistent practice to achieve pedagogical goals.