Designing and Organizing an Online Course

When you design an online course, you will need to view it in a different way than you did when you taught your face-to-face course. If you are used to walking into a classroom and starting where you left off from the last class with only a general plan of what you want to do that day, designing and organizing an online course can be challenging. There is a level of organization, detail, and consistency needed that may not be there in your in-person classes.

You may have wonderful materials and assignments and activities, but if your students cannot easily navigate the course to find everything it reduces both the learning experience and the cognitive energy they have to learn. 

There are three things that will help improve your course usability.

1. Think about your course in weeks – not class meetings
2. Use Modules or a “Week by Week” set-up to organize the course
3. Streamline your site navigation using the Learning Management System (Blackboard or Canvas)

Modules or Weeks

You no longer have to think of your course in terms of 10:00-10:50 MWF or 1:00-2:30 TR blocks. However, your students still need the structure of deadlines even if they are not “at the beginning of class on Tuesday.” The easiest way to organize things for everyone concerned is in weeks or modules. Thinking through questions like the following can help with that organization.

• What do you want to accomplish in a given week?
• What do you want your students to learn and do that week?
• What do you want them to turn in?
• What will you have to grade?

The point is that both you and your students can plan a week of work at a time. There are two critical parts to this. The first is that your due dates are always the same day of the week. Once you choose your due dates, the best thing you can do for your students is to implement it as consistently as possible. Like in-person students who get in the habit of going to class at the same time and the same place every week, online students need to form those same habits to maintain consistent performance across the semester.

The second is when you start and end your weeks. Don’t start your week Monday morning and end it Sunday night if you do not plan on answering student email on Sunday. Given their other responsibilities and the situations they may be in, a lot of their work may happen on the weekend. If you start your week on Tuesday morning and end it the following Monday night you have Monday to answer questions and address concerns. Starting the week on Wednesday is a nice plan if you are using weekly discussions. The initial post can be due Saturday with the follow-up conversation happening Sunday-Tuesday. This gives students a weekend day to compose their original thoughts and another weekend day to participate in the conversation. Again, this is your preference and will help organize the course.

Once you have your course organized in weeks, you can use one module per week to present what you want your students to do that week in the order you want them to do these things. Here is an example:

Getting Started in an Online Course

For a student, whether in an in-person or online class, the beginning of a new semester can be both exciting and a bit intimidating. In an online class, both new and experienced online students can be confused, frustrated, and panicked going into a course site with no directions or explanations. Even if they have taken an online course before, it is likely their previous instructor organized their course differently and you don’t know what the student’s experience of that course was. This makes it critically important to provide sufficient instructions and useful information for them to easily get started with your course.

When students log in to a course for the first time they need to see something that orients them to where they are and explicitly communicates what they are to do in a friendly and welcoming manner. Their first impression of both you and your course colors their experience of the entire semester so getting off to a good start makes a big difference.

Course Home or “START HERE” Page

It is always recommended to set your course home page to a page that you have created, at least for the first couple of weeks. Starting new students on a syllabus page or a modules list isn’t nearly as welcoming as a page you’ve created introducing the course and letting them know what they need to do to get started. The homepage or “START HERE” page is where students begin when they enter the course each time, therefore, it is the most visible part of your site. Take advantage of this space to ensure that your students see you as a real person who enjoys teaching the course and is happy to work with them.

To improve the odds that your students get started with the course as smoothly as possible, there are a few things that need to be on the homepage.

• Information about you. Who you are, how you prefer them to contact you, and how fast you’ll respond.
• Information about anything they need to do before the course begins such as get a book you’ll be using the first week, make sure they have a microphone, a webcam, a particular app or software package, or other supplies.
• Information about what to do to get started with the course. Always presume that at least some of your students have never taken an online course or been in a course that uses Modules. While some students may click around and find things, many won’t. Providing explicit instructions makes it easier on everyone.
• Information about the technology you are using and how to get help with it if they need to.

Brief mentions of other information that you want students to know from the beginning, such as using a plagiarism checker for assignments, that the course includes a semester-long project, group work, or a service-learning component, or that you are offering optional live video meetings, can also be on the homepage or included in a welcome video.

Keep in mind that you can (and probably should) change your home page content after the first couple of weeks of the semester. You can keep it set to the same page and add additional updates or module recap videos at the top. Note that no matter what you set your home page to, your announcements will still be visible at the top.

Course Welcome Video

It is also very nice to have a welcome and course overview video on your homepage – especially with you on camera. As we’ve mentioned throughout, making sure your students see you physically and see that you’re a real human being is important. It’s particularly important at the beginning when they are still figuring things out and need a human touchpoint that can feel comfortable approaching with questions. 

Other Welcoming Actions

Even in large classes, having a personal introduction discussion is recommended. When your enrollments top 50-60 you may want to break them down into smaller groups. It is better for students to get to know at least some others in the class rather than not have introductions at all because the course is too large to introduce themselves to everyone.

Keep in mind that students are not inherently interested in introducing themselves or reading/watching the introductions of their peers. Striking a balance between getting information that is useful to you and starting to build community is important. Think about the information that you would find useful. Would it be helpful to know who are majors in your department and who are taking the course as an elective, to know what interested them in the class or to know what they hope to learn?

The standard “something interesting or unusual about yourself” question, may look frivolous, but it is a good way for students to connect to each other. Other options for online icebreakers include

• posting a meme that they feel represents themselves or portrays something they would want other potential teammates to know about them if you’re having them form their own groups or pairs,
• sharing a picture of a favorite thing or place and a sentence about it,
• sharing two truths and a lie and then having other students guess the lie,
• asking any sort of preference question that could generate groups for later activities such as
  • what type of animal would you be and why (asking them to share a picture of a baby version of the animal will increase interest in the discussion)
  • what type of candy would you be and why (sort into chocolate, fruit-flavored, hard candies, etc.)
  • what superhero power would you have and why (sort into motion powers (speed, flight, etc), control powers (fire, weather, telekinesis, etc.), mutation powers (grow, shrink, stretch, invisibility, etc.), etc.)
  • favorite food with a link to a recipe or restaurant and why they like it

Finding something in common is easier done in casual hallway conversation before class or on break. Providing a place for that social presence to begin online is helpful. Do be careful when asking introduction questions to make sure you are not asking things that students may be uncomfortable saying in public (like age) or that are irrelevant in a course where students are geographically dispersed (like where they went to high school).

Chapter Questions

1. How does designing an online course differ from designing a traditional, face-to-face course?
2. Describe the process of structuring an online course in weeks or modules.
3. Explain why a well-organized course homepage (or START HERE page) is crucial in online courses. What information should it include?
4. Explain what you would do as an instructor to ensure a successful start in your online course. Be specific.
5. Illustrate how you could use a course welcome video.
6. Design an introduction discussion for a course you are (or will be) teaching.