Course Vision

Sep 22, 2015

Hey Everyone,

I have a question for all of you:

If I said to you, tell me what the course (online college or training course) vision is. What would you say? What would be the major elements of your answer?

I'm perplexed, because my organization does not have a good definition for 'vision'. Everyone approaches that idea from different places and nothing really makes sense or others' ideas to miss some element. I hope to get enough feedback so that I can actually create a definition and offer it to my team and organization as a whole...something that will stick. :-)

5 Replies
Rachel Barnum

I start my vision with what the students will be able to do at the end of the course (learning objectives), then how they're going to meet each one.

E.g. "they're going to be able to assess x, so in the course we will be doing an activity that will help them determine the different levels of assessment for x by giving scenarios and having them rate them"

Cathy Edwards

That's what my colleagues said. The issue with that is we follow standardized course descriptions that come with established competencies. So, my colleagues kind of looked at me squint-eyed and thought I was nuts to repeat, in some cases, 20 competencies in a vision.

What I think the vision should be is something overarching...or a general statement of what students will derive from the course as a whole. One way to state it could be..."Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to...." And then whatever fits in there should be a general statement of what they should be able to do, for instance, "write a fully analyzed research paper in a narrowed subject area of 15 - 20 pages following established citation style." The competencies that come with this particular course all lead up to this project.

Cathy Edwards

Thanks all!

I didn't come up with one on my own, but a former colleague of mine, who is now a PM consultant, gave me a good idea and we now use his idea combined with, "Upon completion of this course, students will be able to..." The statement that comes from this is something that, "in a perfect world" would be the vision or goal of the course. It's a one- to two-sentence statement. We then focus on this idea as we begin development and design backwards from there.

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