From Teaching Expertise to Learner Experience: Introducing our New Course on Course Design
The question of what makes teaching effective has driven countless hours of professional development, coaching conversations, and collaborative planning. At GOA, we recently introduced a teaching framework that defines quality teaching through three integrated domains: Content Expertise, Pedagogical Expertise, and Developmental Expertise. This framework helps us see teaching not as a collection of disconnected competencies, but as a complex practice requiring multiple kinds of expertise, held together and applied flexibly.
Yet expertise alone doesn't guarantee learning. The most knowledgeable, skilled, and developmentally attuned teachers still face a critical question: How does that expertise translate into learner experience?
This is where course design enters the conversation. Course design is the space where teaching expertise meets daily reality; where disciplinary understanding, instructional choices, and awareness of student needs take tangible form. It shapes how learners interpret expectations, manage cognitive load, navigate pathways through learning, and ultimately decide whether they belong. When purpose is unclear or structures are hard to navigate, even the strongest teaching can leave learners spending energy decoding the experience instead of engaging with ideas.
From Teaching Expertise to Learner Experience
The premise is straightforward: great teaching requires translating expertise into accessible, navigable learning experiences. This means moving beyond what we know and what we do, to consider how learners encounter, make sense of, and move through our courses.
GOA is now offering a new course, Redesign: Course Design, a comprehensive design institute that invites educators to take a fresh look at their courses through the lens of learner experience. Drawing on backward design and the UDL Guidelines 3.0, this course helps teachers identify where learners may get stuck, overwhelmed, or become unclear, and redesign with intention.
The focus is not on doing more. It's on making expectations clearer, pathways more navigable, and learning easier to access for all students.
1. Start with Learner Experience.
Teachers often design courses from a place of expertise, and rightly so. Content expertise matters. Pedagogical choices matter. But when we design only from what we know or what we want to teach, we risk missing how learners actually experience the course.
Starting with learner experience means asking different questions:
- Where might learners get confused about what's expected?
- Where might cognitive load become overwhelming?
- Where might pathways through the course feel unclear or inaccessible?
- Where might learners question whether they belong or can succeed?
These questions require us to step outside our own perspective and anticipate diverse needs. They invite us to see our courses not as we intend them, but as learners encounter them. This shift from teacher intention to learner experience is foundational to equitable course design.
2. Design Is an Equity Move
Thoughtful course design is not neutral. When we clarify purpose, anticipate barriers, design for clarity, and rethink how we gather evidence of learning, we are making equity moves. We do this not by lowering rigor, but by ensuring that the learning experience is accessible.
The Redesign course is built on this premise. Across four core modules—Clarify Purpose, Anticipate Barriers, Design for Clarity, and Rethink Evidence of Learning—participants will examine common breakdowns in course design and make focused, practical changes. Each module invites teachers to identify one aspect of their course where learners may need support or clarity, and redesign with intention.
This is not about adding more content, more assignments, or more scaffolding. It's about making implicit expectations explicit. It's about ensuring that what we intend is what learners actually experience.
When design becomes clearer and more navigable, more students can focus their energy where it belongs: on thinking, sense-making, and growth. This is how design becomes an equity move.
3. Make It Practical and Ongoing
Course design work can feel overwhelming, especially when teachers are already balancing multiple demands. The Redesign course is structured to meet teachers where they are.
Designed as a deeper, more comprehensive experience than other Redesign offerings, the course allows participants to move through focused modules at their own pace, making practical revisions to their course along the way. Teachers can move through modules in order or start where they have the most immediate need. Each module is designed for immediate application, meaning the work done in the course translates directly into improved learner experience.
Participants also have the option to collect their design revisions into a portfolio, useful for reflection, coaching conversations, or revisiting thinking during future course planning. This reinforces an important truth: course design is not a one-time task. It is ongoing work that deepens as our understanding of learners and our expertise continues to grow.
The framework moves from purpose → barriers → clarity → evidence, giving teachers multiple entry points into redesign. Because inequities in course design can be both structural and subtle, taking an incidental or checklist approach is not sufficient. Instead, this course helps teachers build design thinking into their ongoing practice.
Going Forward
We know that teachers hold deep expertise. We also know that expertise must translate into experience—specifically, into learning experiences that are clear, navigable, and accessible for all students.
Redesign: Course Design offers a framework and a process for making that translation intentional. By starting with learner experience, treating design as an equity move, and focusing on practical, ongoing revision, teachers can ensure that their expertise reaches every learner.
We invite school leaders to encourage teachers to join us for Redesign: Course Design. Registration is open now. This is an opportunity to support your teachers in doing work that matters, not by adding more to their plates, but by helping them design courses where all learners can thrive.
We look forward to learning from and with you.
As GOA’s Director of Engagement, Bonnie leads the organization’s efforts to connect and communicate with instructional leaders, professional learning leaders, students, parents/guardians, and summer‑program audiences—strengthening relationships and amplifying GOA’s impact. Prior to this role, she served as GOA’s Director of Professional Learning, designing and facilitating courses, cohorts, and programs for tens of thousands of educators worldwide.
Bonnie brings deep expertise in the education sector, having served as a school design coach, secondary school teacher, college advisor, and published author. She co‑wrote The Role of Noncognitive Skills in Student Success, a guidebook for educators, and a parent‑focused book on educational trends impacting families and students. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, ParentMap, and Education Week. Bonnie lives in Seattle with her husband, two children, a spirited rescue dog, and a laid‑back tortoise.
