11 Course Design
Course design is the organization and construction of a course. Course design greatly impacts how effectively a course is delivered. Designing effective, engaging online courses takes time, planning and commitment. eLearning can help you get started with a few principles to keep in mind and can connect you to resources and training opportunities.
Online Course Design at a Glance
- Begin with a “Start Here” section.
- Tell your students what they’re going to learn.
- Tell your students what they’ll need to be successful.
- Tell your students how to do what you want them to do.
- Tell your students how to get help.
- Keep the layout simple and predictable.
- Design for a diverse group of people.
- Chunk your content.
- Offer more than one way to access the material.
- Build in ways for students to connect to each other and to you.
- Remove extra materials and links.
- Review everything you build from a student perspective before you publish. Use “Student View” in Canvas.
Resources & Training for Designing Online Courses
If you’ve never taught or taken an online class, be sure to contact eLearning. You may be able to access previously taught versions of your course or other examples that will help you become familiar with the online environment. It is also a good idea to enroll in Canvas 101 for Teachers and in Applying the Quality Matters Rubric (APPQMR) workshops. These facilitated online courses will introduce you to the key qualities of good online course design, as well as provide you with the practical information and practice you’ll need to be successful.
Quality Matters (QM)
Quality Matters (QM) is a nationally-recognized rubric and professional development program for online course design. Several BTC faculty are certified QM peer reviewers who have worked together to conduct informal, internal QM reviews on various courses. Contact eLearning for more information.
QM is an intensive scored course design evaluation program. Formal reviews take several weeks to complete and for some institutions are prohibitively expensive. Washington State’s eLearning Council for community and technical colleges is working with the SBCTC eLearning and Open Education department to define a set of core standards that can apply to any of the 34 colleges in the Washington State system. BTC is further adapting these core standards to create its own rubric of institution-specific course evaluation criteria.
WA Course Design Checklist– V3
The WA Course Design Checklist is a free and open source course design tool developed to assist faculty and other course developers in creating more equitable, inclusive, and engaging online learning environments that promote student and faculty success by removing barriers to teaching and learning. The checklist embraces all of the excellent work already in progress at our colleges intersecting with work in equity and inclusion, accessibility, regular and substantive interaction(RSI); Open Educational
Resources (OER); Universal Design for Learning (UDL); Transparency in Learning & Teaching (TILT), Guided Pathways (GP), Quality Matters (QM), copyright, affordability of course materials, and more. Students, faculty, eLearning staff, and instructional designers from community and technical colleges in Washington all participated in its development. The Washington Course Design Checklist project is managed by Alissa Sells, Program Administrator and Instructional Designer at the State Board for Community & Technical Colleges.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets for teaching, learning, assessing and research. OER are resources for anyone to use, re-mix, improve and redistribute. You are encouraged to consider using OER in your courses for several reasons.
- They are generally free or less expensive for students.
- They are usually available on (or before) the first day of the class.
- The content is almost always customizable, so you can organize the material that best suits your teaching and your students’ learning preferences.
- Your students can participate in the curation and creation of content.
The BTC Library and BTC eLearning can answer questions about OER, help you find OER materials, and provide tips on how to incorporate OER into your courses.
From Instructure – “What are the benefits of OER”
See also the SBCTC Open Educational Resources webpages.
Check out the BTC Library’s Guides on OER.
Accessibility – Inclusive Online Content
It is critical to design your course to be accessible. Not only is it the law (and many institutions have been sued in recent years for failing to provide equitable access to all of their students), it is good practice, good design, and the right thing to do. Accessible design is proactive, web-friendly, and it reduces the need for official accommodations.
Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is the concept of developing learning environments that meet the diverse needs of learners:
- Presenting content in multiple formats (e.g., text AND a diagram AND a video
- Allowing students choices in how they engage with content (students connect their learning to their own experience)
- Accepting different kinds of assignment submissions (e.g., a paper, a video, OR a collage, etc.)
A Few Accessibility Quick Tips:
- Present your content in multiple formats.
- Use Accessibility Checkers.
- Add alt-text to images that describe what is in the image.
- Use Headers/Headings to organize content.
- Avoid PDFs. They can be challenging to make accessible.
- Use tables to present data, not to organize the layout of text.
- The BTC syllabus template includes an institutional Accessibility Statement. It is also considered a best practice to include links to accessibility statements for all technologies and programs you use in your course.
Accessibility Tools
You have access to several resources that can help you make your course content more accessible.
- Canvas accessibility checkers are built into the Rich Text Content Editor. Find more info on using the Canvas checkers here.
- Ally is a built-in accessibility checker currently available in the LMS. Use the red, yellow and green gauges to assess the accessibility of your course files. Contact eLearning with questions about Ally.
- The Caption Hub is where you go in the LMS to request professional captions for your instructional videos (Panopto, YouTube or other). To access the Caption Hub for the first time, contact eLearning.
- Microsoft provides accessibility checkers in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. To access the checker go to File, Check for Issues, Check Accessibility. This generates an accessibility report that you can use to fix areas that need improvement.
- Check out these Accessible Content cheat sheets for Word, PowerPoint, Adobe, etc.!
Check out BTC’s Accessibility Resources site here (you will need your BTC credentials).
Check out Accessibility Micro-Courses, free self-paced courses from the SBCTC, here.
Additional reading: ADA Compliance for Online Course Design
See also Accessibility.
Assessment & Feedback
Clearly explain how you will assess and assign grades. Let students know when to expect grading and feedback on submissions, how to find feedback, and how to ask questions about it.
Communication
- Engage in regular and clear communication with students. Discussion boards can be used to foster interaction between students and between students and faculty. Virtual conferencing can also be used for interaction (e.g. Zoom, Big Blue Button).
- Let students know how to contact you and the timeframe in which you will respond. Also include your availability on evenings or weekends.
- Include a “Netiquette” statement addressing online communication expectations for tone, civility, style, spelling, grammar and cultural sensitivity in the syllabus and/or course introductory content. Find sample statements in the appendix.
Course Access & Navigation
Depending on the nature of your course, you can either open all of the content at the beginning of the quarter or drip content to students over time. Students appreciate some flexibility in how they learn, so try to build that into your courses. Either way, provide a course outline or course map so students have the big picture.
Privacy
Express your expectations for confidentiality in your class. In addition to BTC’s Privacy Statement, provide links to privacy statements for all of the technologies you use in your course.
See also federal policies for Privacy.
Sample Privacy statement for an online course.
Student Support
Make sure your students know where and how to access BTC student support resources.
Submissions
Communicate how you expect assignments to be submitted (Canvas has multiple options available), as well as your expectations for late and early submissions.