Tips for Designing Online Courses 2018 | Online College

Tips for Designing Online Courses

Online course design is rooted in the same solid principles of face-to-face teaching, but requires additional considerations.

Start with the same pedagogic principles of overall course design, such as the Cutting Edge course design philosophy.

-Set out goals for the course: At the end of the course, I want my students to be able to...

-Set skills goals such as working in groups, developing quantitative skills, or improve writing skills

-Choose content to achieve overarching goals

-Develop a course plan

That said, even though the course topic and goals may be the same as a face-to-face course, the course layout, pacing, content delivery and assignments will all be tailored for online delivery. 

-Aim for less content overall, with a variety of methods to deliver course content, and an emphasis on projects, case studies, experiential learning and other forms of engaging assignments.

-Set up the course so that you create a community. This includes the use of discussions, blogs, teamwork, and opportunities to share personal narratives and photos.

-All instructions for the course have to be written in great detail, before the course starts, in language that is simple yet unambiguous. (Smith et al, 2001)

-Written instructions can be supplemented with video instructions and backed up by quick assessments like a syllabus quiz.

-The fact that the entire course must be designed and built before the beginning of the semester will encourage you to consider your goals and your course plan very early on in the process, which is a good thing.

Traditional lecturing is replaced by a variety of multimedia communication tools.

The default mode of communicating course content, the lecture, is generally absent or minimal in an online course. Think of this as liberating rather than constraining, as there are many means to deliver content.

Options for communicating course content

-Strive for a variety of methods to appeal to a broad range of learning styles

-Readings, including the textbook, articles, websites, books, or essays

-Written material that you type up

-Video lectures of yourself talking about a topic

-Videos of someone else talking about a topic, like Richard Alley describing Milankovich cycles or strikes, dips and baked goods by Tom Braziunas at North Seattle Community College or Bill Nye explains seafloor spreading

-Narrated animations, such as the water table

-Humorous yet educational videos like Ring of Fire, sung by Richard Alley in the style of Johnny Cash

-PowerPoint slides the students view and read

Narrated PowerPoint slides with a voice-over by you

-Posts you add to discussion forums - this is a particularly useful place to correct misconceptions or add information when the relevant time comes around

-Real-time question and answer sessions held as synchronous review sessions using instant chat feature (available in many course platforms)

-Questions that lead to directed reading and writing, such as well-framed discussion questions or essay questions within written assignments

-Visualizations, interactive media and simulations, such as PhET's radioactive dating game , that the students use with direction from you

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