I am a strong proponent of backward design: it seems to me, as the saying goes, that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re unlikely to get there. When planning a course, I like either to have stated explicitly for me or (preferably) to develop clearly expressed course goals myself that either include or from which I can develop a set of desired skills and desired content for the course.
There are then two major aspects of “course-ware” to consider: the first is the building knowledge aspect, which is often most facilely achieved with a mostly algorithmic approach: “when confronted with problems involving situation A, utilize technique 1 to try to solve/resolve them.” The second aspect is the building life one, where you realize that because few people will remember your course content or discipline-specific skills much past the end of the course unless they use them in future courses, for the course to have even intermediate value, much less ultimate value, it must help develop skills and habits of mind useful outside its immediate context. The three I tend to pick for my level and type of student are
- Thinking
- Doing
- Reflecting
In practice, a good course needs a synthesis of these two aspects.