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Thriving
in Academe
Creating Significant Learning
Designing the Learning We
Want into the Student Experience
By L. Dee Fink, University of Oklahoma
How can we create learning experiences
that are more significant for more students, more of the time?
Whenever we teach, our students have
an experience. But caring teachers want their students to have not
just an experience but a significant learning experience.
If we want students to have a significant
learning experience—rather than a boring or trite one—we
need to design that quality into our courses. When teachers design
any form of instruction, they make a series of decisions about how
the course will operate.
These decisions focus on a number of
issues, but especially important ones include the learning goals for
the course, the different kinds of teaching and learning activities
needed to reach those goals, and feedback and assessment procedures
that tell both students and teacher whether they have met desired learning
targets.
To be good, caring teachers, it’s
important to learn about the process of course design. Learning about
this process helps us see more clearly how to use many of the major
ideas on good teaching that have emerged in recent years—active
learning, assessment, small groups, writing to learn, and learning
portfolios.
 Meet
L. Dee Fink
L. Dee Fink is director of the Instructional Development Program at the University
of Oklahoma and currently president-elect of the Professional and Organizational
Development (POD) Network in Higher Education. He has worked in faculty development
for over 25 years to “improve teaching to improve learning.” As
part of the program at Oklahoma, he runs a semester-long seminar for new faculty,
organizes orientation programs for new teaching assistants, leads bi-weekly
discussion groups open to all faculty, and engages in individual consultations
and classroom observations with individual professors. Dee has just published
a book, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach
to Designing College Courses (Jossey-Bass, 2003). He can be reached at dfink@ou.edu.
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