Title: Focusing on Learning: Significant Learning
Course: Stage 2: Course Design and Technology > Section: 1. Introducing Stage 2 and Understanding our Students

We now introduce some important concepts to help us think about how to design courses that support student learning and success. We will consider the significant learning that we want our students to achieve, some of the major theories of learning, how our students learn, and identify the characteristics of our course for redesign.

We will first consider high-level course design elements. Later we will zoom in to work out the details of lower level elements, always referring to decisions made at this high level and refining if necessary.

Let's start by reflecting and engaging with the high-level elements that are part of the design of a discipline. Later we will go deeper to define the details of the lower level elements, always referring to decisions made at the higher level and making adjustments if necessary.

Our students are learning all the time and in every part of their lives. As lecturers we have a responsibility to design and teach our courses to provoke and facilitate learning that really matters. Ask yourself “What would I like the impact of this course to be on students, 2-3 years after the course is over? What would distinguish students who have taken this course from students who have not?”

That is what Dee Fink (2003) means by significant learning. This includes students learning the concepts, principles and techniques that you teach them but it goes much further than this too. The diagram below refers to six different kinds of significant learning that lecturers can include in their courses.

Figure 2.1: Fink’s concept of what makes significant learning (Fink, 2003:11)

Now in the light of this new lens using significant learning, undertake Activity 2.1: Review your new course learning outcomes.