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Establish clarity around the scope and values of your short course
The short course market is extremely competitive, and a rapidly growing number of education and professional training options are now available, particularly online.
Those who take short courses usually do so to target a career or professional development focused outcome. Many people, regardless of their profession, want to informally enhance their knowledge, competencies, and skills in specific subject matter, while others need to undertake accredited courses to maintain a vocational membership.
Ensuring that your short course meets the personal and professional needs of its potential learners is essential. To do this, you must ensure that your course aims are well defined alongside demonstrating its benefits and distinctiveness to learners.
What are course aims?
Course aims can be described as a concise summary of the main goals of your course. Setting clear aims from the start will give you direction and assist you in making design decisions about course materials, teaching methods, learning activities, and assessments.
Before you do anything, ask yourself questions such as:
- What educational or skills gap is this course targeting?
- How will learners be different as a result of taking it?
- What is the fundamental purpose of this course?
Establishing the course aims is crucial for the learning design process. If you are co-writing the course, we recommend you agree and refine the learning aims with your colleague(s).
Why spend time on your course aims?
These are many advantages to establishing the main aims of the course. From a tutor and course design perspective, doing so will:
- Set clear direction and reference points for everyone involved in the course design process
- Help you select suitable content material and activities
- Enable you to design the course in a consistent and coherent way.
From a learner perspective, doing so will:
- Provide prospective learners with key information so that they can quickly assess whether the course is relevant to their needs or interests
- Assure prospective learners that their time and money will be well spent
- Enable prospective learners to see what makes your course distinct from comparable courses elsewhere.
Example of course aims
The aims of your short course will be specific to the context of your subject. If you undertake a facilitated ABC Learning Design workshop, we will ask you to summarise your course aims in a statement of around 30 words.
The example below is a bit longer but gives you an indication of how to describe the overarching intention of your course.
This course aims to provide you with the practical advice and guidance you need to treat children’s dental issues and emergencies and achieve excellent results.
Apart from various treatment options, you’ll also learn more about the prevention of dental problems, how to manage children’s behaviour during dentist visits, and how to deal with children presenting with dental trauma as an emergency.
Taken from: Paediatric Dentistry for Non-Specialists (Eastman School of Dentistry)
In this example you can easily see what makes the course stand out as the expectations are clearly defined. The focus is on upskilling professionals in treating and preventing children’s dental problems both in normal and emergency circumstances, as well as offering professional tips about managing children’s behaviour.