ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes communication course design that links ideas about pedagogical philosophy, learning objectives, and taxonomies of learning to provide agency for creating meaningful courses that promote student involvement. The first step in designing or mapping a course is to decide what primary educational values ground the course. The design of teachers' course reflects their own pedagogical philosophy and the educational values they wish to explore with their students. Courses in web design may organize activities from the simple to the complex. Understanding the own philosophical proclivities is a valuable step in course organization the philosophy clarifies the position within disciplinary and institutional culture, and it solidifies the decisions about teaching practices. Within media studies, the experiential approach merges well with a constructivist philosophy in its emphasis on knowledge construction through experimentation with ideas, shared problem solving, reexamination of prior knowledge, and construction of new knowledge.
