After a number of questions from colleagues and friends regarding how I design online course and curriculum material I have decided to make it available here. There are parts of this that may be a little vague, particularly that I am typing this on an iPad while at 39,000 feet without an Internet connection, but that will actually prove my points.
I have set several standards for material and courses I have developed or helped develop. Let’s take them in order of importance:
- Work from a syllabus to create a course outline. Not doing so will cause problems with accreditation at a later date.
- Use the outline to setup a course room. You should have one topic in Moodle for each day of instruction. If it is a weekly hybrid or blended course have a topic for each week. When setting up the course in the LMS do not use the weekly format, use the topic course format. You will have more freedom.
- Begin your course setup by taking your outline and converting it to topic headers. These headers are written for the student, not the instructor. It should be a one paragraph look at what the student will learn in that session.
- Next, go back to your course and add a picture or image. In each header. I would do that as a label following each header so that they can be moved around at a later time.
- Next, save your syllabus as a PDF file and upload into the header section of the course. This is the section right above topic one.
- Also in the header section you should copy a brief description of the course from the syllabus. You should also check to make sure that it makes sense to the student. You already know what is in the course, your students don’t.
- Now you can begin to add the course material.
The course martial you add will vary a little with each class and the type of class it is. There are several important pieces that must be included. Some of these are for the instructors that will be teaching the class and some of them must be included for the students that will be taking the class. A successful course instance (section of class being taught) is a combination of student and instructor. The most important pieces are:
- All lecture material for the day. This includes PowerPoints, handouts, and lecture notes. Those should be hidden from the student and available to the instructors.
- The note handouts that the students will receive. Those should be in PDF format so the students can add highlighting, notes, etc. but cannot change the original slides.
- Labs, shop projects, or worksheets in PDF form format. These should be put into each topic in the order they should be completed.
- Instructor notes in case the instructor needs to know anything about the work. Include notes on any special supplies that may be needed or advance setup on anything that may be needed.
- A link or two to an external website. Perhaps a video on YouTube or a link to a manual or industry group. This is designed for the student that wants to know more and go above and beyond.
- Include any additional material that may be required.
There are a few additional standards that should be followed:
- All line items in each topic should be prefaced with a description of what they are:
- Use PPT: in front of PowerPoints.
- Use Handout: in front of handouts.
- Use Lab: in front of labs or shop projects.
- Use Quiz: in front of quizzes.
- Use Exam: in front of exams.
- Use Video: in front of any videos that you link in.
- Use WebLink: in front of any external links.
- For external links and videos it is usually a good idea to open them in a new window rather than trying to embed them or use a frame.
- Pick a font and a font size and stick with it. It should look to the student like one person wrote the course, not five or six different unorganized people.
- Keep the look and feel extremely simple and easy.
- Indent related activities. For example, if you have an assignment and it refers to a reading assignment that is a PDF document make sure you put the PDF document as the next item and indented by one space.
A sample of a course topic without the editing turned on is here:
A sample of the course materialwith editing turned on is here:
A sample of the course setup is here:
A sample of the course header is here:
One the most important points I can make is that all courses taken by your students should have the same look and feel. A course that has a different look and feel from other courses they have taken is very confusing to the students.
Before a course is taught it needs to be the instructors responsibility to check and verify all links. Any broken links need to be reported to the instructors department chair and fixed.
As I pointed out earlier this is a quick cheat cheat, but after having developed a few hundred courses I have found that these standards have worked well.