Course Description and Takeaways

Course Description

This should only be one paragraph long. It should give the reader a sense in words of what the course is about. It could be as short as three sentences but probably no more than five. You can use “you” language to personalize it. Tell the potential viewer what they will learn and how they will benefit from taking your class. Keep it general. This is the view from 30,000 feet.

Here’s an example of a Kingswood Learn MicroCourse description:

Takeaways

What do you want participants to gain from taking your course? What knowledge will they gain? What skills might they acquire? Will it change their attitudes?

Here’s an example of what you might submit:

Deeper Dive:

Through this course, there will be opportunities to go into greater detail. But we don’t want to scare you off either. Don’t feel like you need to read these deeper dives. They are not required.

At a college, they talk about "learning outcomes" as the knowledge, skills, and dispositions you should get from a course. For these MicroCourses, you will be fine if you stop at the idea of desired “takeaways” from your course.

However, if you wanted to take the course to the next level, you might formulate learning outcomes instead and submit them with your formal proposal.

Here is the format we have been using for Learning Outcomes with the formal MicroCourses on the Kingswood Learn platform. We start with this framework: “This course (or lesson) aims to equip you to…” Then we follow those words with a numbered list of outcomes. A nice practice is to have one outcome for each lesson of a course. The number of outcomes is thus usually in the 5-7 range.

The word outcome has a sense of takeaway. In an ideal world, what will they take away from your class? Don’t oversell it. They’re not going to solve world hunger, for example. Outcomes begin with a verb and usually only one verb per outcome. You might consult Bloom’s taxonomy for the way outcome verbs typically work.