Aligning Course Outcomes, Assessments and Activities

To keep your course development process as streamlined as possible, it is helpful to start with the end in mind, which are the outcomes of a course. Once you have finalized the course outcomes, you can align content and activities to support students in achieving the outcomes. An alignment map template is provided below to help you organize your course. Check out the resources on this page as you work on designing your course. 

Visit the LSU Training & Event Registration website to view and register for an upcoming offering. For immediate need, you can access the recordings of the workshop(s) below.

Academic Engagement Activity (AEA): Federal Financial Aid regulations require the confirmation of attendance in order for students to receive federal aid. The confirmation of attendance in online courses is achieved by students completing an academic activity in Moodle by the Census date. If there is no academic activity available and students are not able to provide evidence of participation, it will result in a delay in the disbursement of financial aid to students. This confirmation is required for all students. You should plan to provide qualifying active academic engagement activities before census day to assist students in maintaining their federal financial aid. Check out these Frequently Answered Questions for additional details.

Time-on-Task: For credit-bearing courses, time on task is the amount of work represented in intended learning outcomes and verified by evidence of student achievement that reasonably approximates one hour of classroom instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week. One credit equates to 15 hours of in-class time; therefore, for a 3-credit course, student engagement and study time should total 135 hours. You must keep these estimates in mind when designing course activities and distributing the time students spend on the activities.

Course Time Calculator: Use the Wake Forest University Workload Estimator 2.0 to calculate time estimates for your course.