Learning Plans: The GPS for Courses

Like a global positioning system helps us reach a destination, learning plans help learners navigate their courses—what they will learn, how they will learn it, how they will be assessed, and how they will achieve competence.

Learner-centered activities engage students

Students learn best when they are actively engaged in their learning process—when we give them direct responsibility for their own learning.  

It’s not that students can’t learn from the “sage on the stage” approach to teaching, but it often places them in a passive role.

Designing courses with learner-centered activities fosters:

• critical thinking
• active learning
• the encoding of new knowledge into long-term memory

‍Learning plans help students and instructors

Learning plans are written by instructors to help learners navigate the learning process by linking:

• what learners will learn to do
• how they will learn to do it
• and when they will know they have achiebed competence

As such, learnings plans provide learners with a handbook for learning that helps them:

• consciously set goals
• select strategies
• regulate their progress
• adjust personal learning behavior

Developing learning plans helps faculty link learning activities and performance assessment to core abilities, learning objectives, and course competencies.  

The WIDS software learning plan feature provides tools for designing learning activities:  

• Develop learning plans for the student simultaneously with teaching plans for instructors.
• Select activities from a WIDS library to quickly define the learning experience.
• Link your learning plans to course competencies to show learners the relationship between the activities and competency attainment.
• Design activities aligned to the learning cycle - so that learners encounter adequate comprehension and practice, before moving to the application phase.

Navigate your next course with WIDS

Like GPS helps us navigate to a new location, WIDS software helps faculty design engaging learner-centered activities and develop learning plans that help students successfully navigate through a course.

WIDS (Worldwide Instructional Design System) is a nonprofit organization that provides curriculum design software, consulting, and training services.  Download the free Learning Plan Checklist.

‍