Offering a college course, like any activity, can be done with varying degrees of investment of time and resources. At the high end, there are initial considerations of the material to be covered and the intellectual goals that learners are to achieve. Even in an introductory course that appears to have a standard outline common to most test, the instructors decides how broad a set of topics to cover. This decision determines the depth to which each topic can be presented and considered by learners because covering all the topics in a typical text can be a race against the limited time in an academic term. Those teachers who cover fewer topics but in greater depth also have the opportunity to expect deeper understanding from learners, perhaps by including discussions, interactive activities, or supplementary readings.

It is also not a trivial matter to identify the conceptual goals for a course: It is necessary to know how the teacher would recognize that a student has acquired the skills and understanding that are intended to be included in the course design. These decisions are contextual in that some instructors assume students are taking a program of courses in a field of study, whereas other instructors use demographic information to identify who their learners are and what place the current course will most likely have in the larger picture of their education. Different conceptual goals would be appropriate depending on the nature of such an analysis of learners and the curriculum.