Writing a Course Plan / Outline

Here is some advice.

A) PREPARING TO WRITE A COURSE OUTLINE

1) Choose an Organizational Pattern or Method

After reading the course title, course description, and understanding the purpose of the course, one of the first things you need to do is choose how you will organize your material.

There are several basic organizational patterns or methods of arranging the body of your material. Choose the one(s) most appropriate for your need.

Some of these are:

Location

Location can be spatial or geographic.

Alphabetically

This refers to organizing content following the alphabet. E.g. Organizing names of people in a phone book, books in a library, etc.

Time (Chronological)

Historical topics dealing with the sequence of events or demonstration speeches.
E.g. The Life, Ministry, and Teaching of Jesus Christ can be organized chronologically. Christ in eternity, Christ at creation, Christ in the OT, Prophecies about the birth of Christ, the birth of Christ, childhood, preparation for ministry, baptism (inauguration), early ministry… crucifixion, resurrection, accession, later return, and reign in eternity. A lesson on the Life and Ministry of Paul will be best done using a chronological approach as well.

Categories

This is a broad and useful way of organizing information. If you were writing about the diet of people in ancient Israel, you may want to break the topic down into categories such as fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, etc. Many topics can be organized into subcategories.

Hierarchy (or Continuum)

Hierarchies are useful when showing how one piece of information is connected to another in order of importance or rank.

The above five can be remembered using the acrostic LATCH

Logical

This is similar to a hierarchical arrangement. It works well for a broad topic which is broken down into naturally occurring sub-topics.

Cause-Effect

You can also organize content by presenting its cause followed by its effects.

Problem – Solution

This method presents the problems, and then follow by presenting the solutions to those problems. In a sense, it’s a type of categorization. One category is problems, another category is solutions.

Question & Answer

Similar to problem-solution is question & answer. Here, the presenter selects key questions about the main subject, poses them and provides answers.

Advantage – Disadvantage

Whenever suitable, you can address a topic by looking at advantages and disadvantages.

Expositional Analysis

In this method of organization, the course is organized around key points from the course description. All outlines need to be based on the course description, however, sometimes, there is no easy way to make the topics have a consistent pattern. This method basically takes key points from the course description and expounds on them so that at the end of the course, everything mentioned in the course description has been done.

2) Envision Your Course as a Story, Essay, or Movie

A great course is like a speech. The course title is the title of your speech and the course description is like the introductory paragraph of your speech. The material you will cover from week 1 to week 8 is like 8 major points that you will cover in your body. Each major point then has sub-points, which are subtopics that you need to cover for each week to complete the main point or content for that week. At the end of the 8 weeks, you will tie the course with a conclusion that reviews everything you have covered and what the student should do moving forward. Again, Your course is to be like a story you tell. It has a title, introduction (course description), body (with main points corresponding to the weeks), and a conclusion at the end of week 8. Another way to see it is that your course is like an essay, it has a title, introduction, body (with main points corresponding to each week), and a conclusion at the end of week 8. The introduction is reviewed at the beginning of week 1 before it’s main point or content is treated.

3) Do Extensive Research

Spend time doing research and thinking through how you want to teach the course.

4) Write Course Plan

Before a candidate is hired to create a course at SU, he will be required to submit a 6-page course plan for the course he is interested in teaching. Submission of the course-plan will be the final step prior to being hired. If a candidate performs excellently on this task – he will be hired to teach that course.

This is a great way for us to see how he plans to structure and teach the class. It also allows us to understand if he can do the work independently or will require additional support. 

The six-page course plan should be arranged as follows: On page 1-5, you should present 1) the course title and course description, 2) detailed course outline, 3) Brief explanation of the course outline. On page six, you should present the bibliography.

B) WRITING A COURSE OUTLINE

Page 1-5

1. Course Title and Course Description

Copy the course title and course description from the course descriptions‘ page and paste it in your course plan. The rest of your course plan needs to be guided by the course title and description.

For example:

BIBL 325 The Life, Ministry, and Teaching of Christ, 3 credits

This course is a study of the missionary life, ministry, and teaching of Christ as revealed in the four Gospels. It takes a chronological and thematic view of Christ’s life and missionary work and interprets key events and teachings of Christ helping students make practical application to their lives. The course also places value on the harmony of the Gospels, emphasizes the understanding of who Jesus Christ was and is, what He did, and why such revelation is important. A view of Jesus as a missionary and as a slave to God’s will be emphasized.

Undergraduate Course Descriptions | Graduate Course Descriptions

2. Detailed Course Outline Table

After the course title and course description, we would like you to come up with a detailed course outline that shows everything you intend to teach in each week down to the lesson titles and main points to be covered. Each week is supposed to have about two hours worth of lessons. Instead of one long two-hour lesson, we want it broken down into shorter sub-topics that will together add up to about two hours. The outline should follow a clear organization pattern or method such as the ones described above.   In week 1 below, we show the main lesson (topic) and sub-topics for BIBL 325 as an example for you to follow in your own outline. Your outline must be a table and must have the headings and structure shown below. It’s best to copy that table and make changes to it or create a similar table in a word processor.  The course outline table should look like the following:

Week	Main topic and sub-topics*	Reading Material	Assignments/ Exams	Points*
1	Preexistence of Christ and Preparation for His Birth Christ before creation Christ at creation Christ at the fall of Adam & Eve Christ’s Role In Redemption  What is the Atonement? Christ in the Old Testament Prophecies about Christ and about the Crucifixion	Blomgberg, Ch. 11; Tozer, Ch. 1-2 Memory Verses for week 1	Syllabus and Course Requirements Quiz Student Introductions Discussion Forum 1	10 0 20
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

* As shown in the example with Week 1 of BIBL 325, first write the main topic for each week’s lessons and after that write out as bullet points the sub-topics you will cover under that main topic. The example only shows the first week, however, you are expected to show a similarly detailed course outline for the entire duration of your course (usually 8 weeks but maybe 10 weeks depending on the course). In the example shown, “Preexistence of Christ and Preparation for His Birth” is the main topic for week 1. The sub-topics are the seven bullet points that are shown. When I start actually preparing the lessons for week 1, each sub-topic or bullet point is going to be a separate short lesson that I will prepare for that week. Ideally, a short lesson covering a sub-topic can be anywhere from 5 minutes long to 30 minutes long when recorded. This is a very easy task. If you are an experienced teacher and find this confusing, complicated, or time-consuming, talk with us. Chances are you may be over-reading into it because this approach is a simple logical approach commonly used for preparing and delivering lessons.
** Points: In this column, write the number of points awarded to each assignment or exam given. E.g. If an exam is out of 100 points, then put it there.

3. Brief Explanation of the Detailed Course Outline Table

Put a little flesh on the lessons (topics) and sub-topics portion of the outline. Write out the short story, essay, or movie that your course will become. Write at least 1 paragraph per week that explains the content you intend to cover for that week. This should clearly be delineated to show each week’s content explained with a little bit of detail. It also should flow well with good transitions between the points that enable the weeks and their content to flow together.

Page 6

4. Bibliography

On page six, list at least 10 books you plan to use as resources when developing the course.  The top two or three books on the list should be books that will be prescribed for students to purchase for use in the course. The rest should be books that you, the teacher,  will consult when preparing the course. We expect teachers to cite authorities in the field during their courses. These books will become part of your bibliography for the course.