Another course design consideration: How will you design clear learning pathways for your students?

Online, you are not there to give ‘just in time’ guidance, so your course organization and expectations must be explicit before the first day of class. Students must be able to login and get started without asking for help! This page will present ‘non-negotiables’ in course design, or elements that must exist to keep students focused on learning, not searching!

A poorly organized course wastes students’ time, energy, and money. Instead, our goal is to create a humanized course that is designed with the User (Student) in mind.

Instructional Strategies & Best Practices

Ensure your noticeable teaching presence

A quality online course requires a strong teaching presence– how you design instruction, facilitate discourse, and direct instruction (Community of Inquiry, Anderson, Rourke, Garrison and Archer, 2001) (Links to an external site.).

According to Sheridan & Kelly (2010) the following represent the top 10 indicators of Teaching Presence most important to students:

1. Make course requirements clear
2. Clearly communicate important due dates/time frames for learning activities
3. Set clear expectations for discussion participation
4. Provide clear instructions on how to participate in learning activities
5. Provide timely feedback on assignments and projects
6. Clearly communicate important course topics
7. Create a course that is easy to navigate
8. Clearly communicate important course goals
9. Keep the course calendar updated
10. Always follow through with promises made to students

As we continue with online course design on the next pages, we will address many of these indicators. Others will be addressed more fully in other course modules.

Follow the 5 Minute Rule

Students should be able to login to an online course and know how to start within five minutes or less. Time wasted searching for content or trying to figure out what is expected is frustrating, negatively impacting student motivation and persistence.

Ensure that your teaching presence is evident in your course design by creating a course site that is:

• Easy to navigate
• Chunked into logically sequenced topics (modules)
• Consistent and predictable in organization
  • In each course
  • In each module
  • In each page
  • In each assessment and activity
• Explicit in instructor expectations for all assignments, activities, and interactions

Next up

Next, we will consider how to make our course organization consistent and easy for students to navigate. We will identify learning goals, and then use those to create a course map that makes sense for students.