Creating and Maintaining a Home Sourdough Baking Practice

Sourdough baking requires the maintenance and use of a sourdough starter, which is a symbiotic colony of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria that, under the right conditions, can naturally leaven bread. Unlike baking breads with packaged yeast, using a sourdough starter to create leavened bread can be intimidating—even for experienced home bakers.

This self-paced course provides home bakers with the knowledge and confidence they need to successfully bake with a sourdough starter. With step-by-step instruction, home bakers can create and maintain a sourdough starter, apply the basics of slow-fermentation and baking science, use sourdough starter to make leavened breads and other baked goods, and troubleshoot common issues.

Design Document

The design document provides a thorough description and outline of the course. Major features of this document include:

• Target audience
• Instructional objectives and strategy
• Assessment strategy
• Course outline
• Development tools and time

Alignment Chart

Alignment is a crucial factor in developing effective instruction that engages learners and keeps them on track to achieve course objectives. Good alignment happens when objectives, activities, and assessments are connected and reinforce one another. The following chart shows the two terminal objectives for this course and how the enabling objectives, assessments, and activities work together to help the learner achieve the goal of establishing a successful home sourdough baking practice.

In his book eLearning by Design (2012), William Horton outlines three types of activities that provoke meaningful learning experiences:

• Absorb activities offer a passive, but mentally active, way for learners to consume information through reading, listening, or watching content.
• In Do activities, learners apply skills by practicing a procedure, playing a game, answering questions, experimenting, or exploring.
• Connect activities offer a way for learners to correlate new learning to work, life, and/or prior learning.

This course utilizes all three types of activities in combination to create a meaningful learning experience and facilitate long-term retention of sourdough baking knowledge and skills.

This course also uses principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). This framework makes learning accessible and engaging for a wide variety of learners. The three main principles of UDL are:

• Engagement: Stimulate interest and motivation
• Representation: Present information and content in different ways
• Action and Expression: Differentiate the ways that learners can express what they know

The learning activities in this course deliver content in a variety of ways to engage learners who have different preferences for learning. One example is the video content that demonstrates different sourdough baking techniques. The video provides multiple means of representation by offering alternatives for auditory and visual information. The narrator in the video describes in detail what she is doing in the video as another way of conveying knowledge to learners with a vision impairment or a preference for absorbing information through listening. The video also has close captioning for learners with a hearing impairment or a preference for absorbing content visually.

Assessment

In this course, learners take a quiz after completing the activities for the following enabling objectives:

• Create sourdough starter from scratch
• Feed sourdough starter
• Create a plan to store and maintain sourdough starter properly to maintain its health

This assessment provides feedback on their understanding of the process of creating, feeding, and maintaining a sourdough starter. It features a variety of objective question types (e.g., pick one, pick multiple, true/false) that keeps it from becoming monotonous. It is short in length and is graded automatically. The learner receives immediate formative feedback after answering each question so that any misconceptions do not become entrenched. The formative feedback is important as this activity is designed to both provide opportunities for learning and reinforcement as well as to give learners a sense of their progress.

Job Aids

In this course, two job aids help learners to connect new knowledge about hydration levels in sourdough baking with their own baking practice. The job aids also serve as a way to minimize cognitive load by providing learners with quick access to facts they need to utilize in their baking.

Hydration Quick Reference

The Hydration Quick Reference helps learners understand how a dough’s hydration level impacts the texture, crust, and crumb of a finished loaf of bread. This information helps bakers make decisions on how to adjust hydration levels in home baking projects.

Bread Hydration Calculator

The Bread Hydration Calculator is a tool that allows learners to quickly adjust hydration levels and the scale of recipes without engaging in complex math. This is an example of providing multiple means of action and expression according to the UDL framework. It supports learners by allowing them to focus on baking, not complicated math. The calculator is available in Excel, Google Sheets, and app format.

Interactive Timeline

This interactive timeline helps learners create a schedule to bake overnight, no-knead sourdough bread. The timing of the steps to bake no-knead bread are flexible, so bakers don’t need to establish a precise schedule to get good results. They can use three daily events, dinnertime, bedtime, and breakfast, to create a timeline that works for them.