For whom are you designing this course?
Effective course design starts with understanding who your students are. At UBC, this means recognizing that students bring diverse backgrounds, experiences, perspectives, and needs into the classroom, and that these differences affect how they access, experience, and succeed in your course.
Taking time to consider your students helps you design more intentionally, anticipating potential barriers, making learning more relevant, and building in supports that allow a wider range of students to participate and succeed. This might include how you structure activities, design assessments, or create opportunities for connection and belonging.
Rather than designing for a single “typical” student, you’re designing for a diverse group of learners—and creating conditions where all students feel valued, supported, and able to engage meaningfully in the learning process.
Review who your student were in your courses. What do you remember about them that will inform your design?
About Your Students
- Academic level: What year are they in? What’s their major or program?
- Prior knowledge: What do they already know? What gaps might they have?
- Motivation: Why are they taking your course? (requirement, interest, career?)
- Concerns: What worries them about this course or subject?
- Goals: What do they hope to achieve or learn?
- Constraints: What might make learning difficult? (time, other courses, work, family?)
Consider the design implications these bring about
- What assumptions can you safely make about their prior knowledge?
- How can you make the course relevant to their motivations?
- What learning barriers need to be addressed in your design?
Remember your students are diverse. What you recall about them represents only a facade of their life and common patterns, not every individual. Stay flexible and responsive as you learn more about your actual students throughout the term.
Student Empathy Mapping
In their book, Understanding by Design, authors Wiggins and McTighe describe empathy as “the deliberate act of trying to find what is plausible, sensible, or meaningful in the ideas and actions of others…” (pp. 98-99).
Empathy requires us to be attentive to the experiences of others and (in a sense) walk alongside them as we work to understand what may (at times) seem puzzling to us because of the distance between our experiences and those of our students.
Sample empathy map of a student persona
Let’s spend some time to develop and deepen our own insights about our learners, their experiences, challenges, and perspectives.
Step 1: Download this blank Empathy Map
Step 2: Think of a student you had interacted with in the past
Give your student persona (or composite) a name, situation (their history/story), and intentions (motivations for study). Write a few sentences in the middle of your map describing your student persona so that you can really visualize your student as you are completing the map.
Step 3: Fill in the empathy map in as much detail as possible; consider some of these prompting questions:
- Actions: What do you imagine that your students do (in class and out)? This can include their lives outside of class.
- Thoughts/Feelings: Building from the actions, what thoughts and feelings do you imagine they have or experience on a regular basis? This can include thoughts about themselves, their classes, their decisions, etc.
- Influences: What do you perceive to be the influences on their thoughts, feelings, and actions? This might be their beliefs and values about themselves, the world, and their purpose. It may also include the influence of people who are important in their lives.
- Goals: From what you’ve surfaced so far, what do you imagine the students’ goals might be for their studies, their lives, and their future?
- Pain Points: What disappointments may have influenced your student’s thinking or behaviour?
Step 4: Review your entire map and consider where you may need to take a deeper dive in your imagination to surface important details
What are the problems/needs that your learner needs to address? Use the empathy mapping framework to develop a deeper understanding of your students’ perspectives, challenges, and needs.
What insights emerge as you review your empathy map?
If possible, validate your empathy map by talking to actual students, either from previous offerings of the course or similar courses. Their perspectives might surprise you and refine your understanding of who they are and how they learn best.
Stay in Tune with Your Students:
Here are three activities you could build into your course to help you get started:
1. Beginning of the term: Getting to Know You Survey
A short, low-stakes survey that invites students to share how they learn best.
You might ask:
- Tell me a bit about yourself beyond academia.
- What are you hoping to get out of this course?
- What helps you learn most effectively in a course?
- What challenges have you experienced in similar courses?
- Is there anything you’d like me to know to support your learning?
Why it works:
Gives you early insight into who they are and their expectations, prior experiences, and potential barriers, and signals that their learning matters.
2. Throughout the term: Observe and Give Students Space
Pay attention to how your students behave in class.
- Who speaks easily?
- Who participates orally? Who prefers writing?
- Who needs time before contributing? Who understands but hesitates to speak?
Why it works:
This gives you a chance to observe what they reveal through their behaviours, choices, and work that may not be revealed in a survey. Active observation also allows you to respond to their needs.
Key Takeaways
UBC students come from diverse backgrounds. Putting their needs first when designing a course will help us create a more welcoming and inclusive learning environment.
Our course design considerations will change slightly each time we teach the course based on the students that we are teaching. It is a good idea to reflect on who your students are and what they may be experiencing during each iteration of your course.
Want to join a course design cohort?
The Centre for Teaching Learning and Technology (CTLT) hosts annual course design programming.
Consider joining the Journey into Course Design (a two-day workshop where you will explore the four stages of course design: reflecting on situational factors, writing learning outcomes, considering assessment options, and exploring instructional strategies to support learners), or the Course Design Intensive for faculty (a multiday course design program where you will will work in an a supportive atmosphere, both individually and collaboratively, to design or redesign a UBC credit course that you teach or are planning to teach.)
