As a college professor, you may be wondering what course design is right about now or more
importantly why it's so important to you.
Well, course design involves planning for your students' learning and that is something
that is always important -- regardless of our instructional format.
But when you teach online, the online learning environment you put together is the landscape
or the "experience" that your students will leverage to developing the knowledge and skills
you expect them to master.
When an online course is effectively designed, the objectives, assessments, and activities
are in alignment, creating a learner-centered environment.
This empowers online learners to understand what you expect of them rather than making
learning a guessing game.
In learner-centered environments, students also understand why they are completing activities
because the relationship between the activity and their learning objective is clear.
So, what are the steps involved with designing an online course?
Well, they don't start where you might expect them to.
Often, when we teach a class we approach our subject matter by organizing it into logically
sequenced topics that will be delivered to students over time.
That is part of the course design process but it's not where we start.
Instead of starting at the beginning of our course,
We need to identify the knowledge and skills we expect our students to have as they complete
the course.
After all, if we don't know where we're going, we'll never get there.
All together there are three steps in the online course design process.
1.
Identify desired results, which we have just previewed a bit.
2.
Determine acceptable evidence.
3.
Plan learning experiences and facilitation.
Let's take a closer look at each step.
We just examined step one a moment ago and identified the importance of starting with
a clear understanding of the skills and knowledge you expect your students to have at the completion
of the course.
This is the step where content in the course would be organized into manageable chunks,
referred to as learning modules or learning units.
Each of those modules will include clear, measurable learning objectives that communicate
to students what they are expected to be able to do by the time they complete the module.
The module objectives are aligned to support the overarching course skills and knowledge
you have already identified.
In Step 1 you are identifying what you want your students to know and do.
In Step 2, Determine acceptable evidence, you move deeper into the design of each learning
module.
The modules already have learning objectives, which you established in Step 1, now your
task is to think about how your students will demonstrate to you that they have learned.
A more common word for this process is assessment.
In Step 2 you are identifying how you will know that your students have learned.
And remember, we also want our students to be able to see their own development and growth
too, which makes this step even more important.
The third step in the course design process is Plan learning experiences and facilitation.
Now you begin to create the activities that students will engage and participate in.
These are their learning experiences.
Through these activities, they will grow, develop and master the objectives you identified
at the start of the module.
In Step 3, you are identifying what they will do.
In summary, to design your online course, you will:
Identify skills and knowledge you expect your students to have at the completion of the
course.
These are the course outcomes to which all the module objectives, assessments, and activities
will be aligned.
Then organize your course into manageable learning modules.
Identify the duration of each module.
Module durations should strive to be consistent in duration, especially in accelerated online
courses.
Now, apply the three steps of online course design to each of your learning modules: 1.
Identify Desired Results 2.
Determine acceptable evidence 3.
Plan learning experiences and facilitation