Course Design Institute
Helping instructors become the teachers they dream of being
NEW PERSPECTIVES. NEW POSSIBILITIES.
The CTE’s award-winning, nationally recognized Course Design Institute will help you reimagine the courses you teach and the ways you teach them. It will help you create powerful learning environments capable of fostering intellectual curiosity, a sense of wonder, and deep, meaningful learning for all of your students.
The five-day Institute begins with the question, “What do you want your students to know 3-5 years after the course is over?” Experienced presenters and learning team facilitators then guide you through the iterative, dynamic, and scholarly process of learning-focused course design. In the end, you will design a course you love to teach, and one students love to take.
Course Design Institute Video Transcript
Alex Bick: CDI’s philosophy is teaching, not just content delivery. Teaching is about engaging students and you meeting them where they are, and CDI really focused me on: what are the learning outcomes that I want the students to get at the end of the class, but also three, five years into the future? What is it I want them to remember? What is it I want them to understand?
Alicia Frantz: It's really a mirror of what I want to do in my classroom, right? Not just this is a checklist and then you'll have the perfect syllabus at the end, but this is the science behind memory. This is the data we have that says that this works or at least this works better than what we've been doing previously.
Alex Bick: Part of what's fun about CDI is rather than being a teacher, you're a student. When you watch a really good teacher implementing a particular kind of activity, it spurs all kinds of ideas. Could I do that in my classroom? How would I go about it? And over the course of CDI, I must have seen them model 30 or 40 different kinds of activities and 30 or 40 different kinds of ways of asking questions or soliciting information from students that I was vigorously jotting down to take with me and to use myself.
Alicia Frantz: And so that is one of the great benefits of CDI. It's saying, I am interested in changing this thing. What are other people doing?
Alex Bick: Some of the people that were in my group have been teaching for 25 years. Some of them were first-time teachers so a broad range of experience, but everybody essentially facing the same challenge, which is how do you get students excited about the material?
Alicia Frantz: The sort of frustrating thing is that you only get one shot to try it and then you have to wait another year to retry it with a class and so it's really nice to have that starting point that someone already said, I did that. I tried it from scratch that first time. Here's all the things that went terrible. Don't do any of these things, right?
Alex Bick: It gives you an opportunity to set aside some of your fears and some of your anxieties and to enjoy teaching more and that gives me greater confidence going into the classroom and it gives me uh greater confidence going into the semester and allows me to devote time to research and to engagement and the other things that I hope to do here at UVA.
More about the program's goals, outcomes, and values.
More about applying to CDI.
More about next steps once accepted into CDI.
More about a typical schedule for the week and options for parking and lodging.
More about our highly experienced facilitators.
Sample Syllabi
teaching.virginia.edu
List of syllabi created during previous iterations of CDI.
List of the program's most commonly asked questions.