How To Create & Teach An Online Course

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Do you want to build and teach your own online course? This is a high-level summary of the tasks and steps involved in creating and delivering a well-designed online course. Please note that creating an online course is a highly complex process.

This summary includes:

• How to design your online course
• How to plan your lectures
• How to record your video lectures
• How to build your course
• How to foster student engagement
• How to asses students learning and how to create effective assignments
• And how to deal with accessibility and legal issues

The purpose of this paper is to help teachers and instructors create effective online and blended courses.  There is a strong demand for quality online education. By quality education, we mean that an online course should have the following components or features:

• Instructional strategies based on sound pedagogical principles
• Clear learning objectives and course goals
• Student engagement
• Fun, pedagogically sound, rich and relevant activities and materials that support the goals and objectives

What are the steps in developing an online course?

First Step: Designing and Planning

•  Use “backward design”
  • Backward course design
  • There are two Youtube videos, watch them: Grant Wiggins – Understanding by Design 1; Grant Wiggins – Understanding by Design 2

• Identify learners, use the ADDIE model
  • Who are your learners?
  • Learn as much as you can learn about your students
  • Course level, grad students? Undergrad?
  • How many students?

• Identify and define learning objectives
  • Good vs. Bad Learning Objectives
  • Writing Measurable Learning Objectives
  • Writing Objectives Using Bloom’s Taxonomy

• Create a consistent, weekly course structure
  • You may use storyboards to organize your course
  • Best Practices for Developing Content Modules and Module Pages
  • A typical course structure consists of:
    • Module 1
      • Overview
      • Lecture
        • Powerpoint slides, Readings, video lectures etc.
      • Assignments
        • Resources
        • Discussions
        • Task
      • Module 1 Quiz
    • Module 2…..

• Develop your syllabus
  • An online course syllabus should include:
    • Course information
    • Required materials, like textbooks etc
    • Course objectives
    • Instructor information like contact info etc
    • Course policies (grading etc)
  • Also your syllabus should include weekly schedule:
    • Lesson 1/Module 1/Week 1
      • Readings
      • Presentations
      • Assignments
      • Discussions
      • Quiz

• Assessments & Assignments: Align learning objectives to course activities and assessments
  • Aligning Assessments to SLOs
  • Formative and summative assessments
  • Rubrics
  • Assessments
  • Writing Multiple Choice Test Questions
  • Test Construction Manual
• Plan your online lectures
• Copyright and accessibility standards

Second Step: Building

• Produce the course content
• Organize your lectures
• Create engaging content and activities 
• You can use open source and free public resources for educational content to find content
• Record your lectures
  • Lecture capture tools 
  • Optimal Video Length for Student Engagement
  • How to Look Good on a Webcam
• Powerpoint
• Copyright issues?
  • Link out
  • Fair use
  • If needed, request permission
• Accessibility?
  • Accessible vs. Inaccessible
  • 20 Tips for Teaching an Accessible Online Course
• After you have developed all the course activities materials, you are ready to deploy and track e-learning content. You may use your school’s or organization’s tool (e.g., Desire2Learn, Canvas, BlackBoard or Moodle). You may also use other options.
  • Post your content

Third Step: Teaching

• Foster Student-to-Student Connections
  • Use technology to enhance collaboration
    • Blogs, Wikis, Social Media, Skype, etc
  • Design discussion activities
    • Online discussions  
    • Sample Discussion Board Questions That Work
    • Keeping Online Asynchronous Discussions on Topic
  • Group assignments and works
    • What are the challenges of group work and how can I address them?
    • Problem-Based Learning
    • Collaborative Learning
    • What are best practices for designing group projects?
    • What are the benefits of group work?
• Connect with your students
  • Timely feedback
  • Show your face
  • Join, as instructor, discussions
  • Answers questions / emails
• Engaging activities
• Synchronous sessions?
• Create a strong learning community among students
• 10 Principles of Effective Online Learning: Best Practices in Distance Education
• Active Learning in Online Courses
• Foster student interaction
• Discussions and communications
• Instructor communication

Ready to Go?

Make sure that:

• You evaluate your online course using these rubrics (one or more):
  • Quality Online Course Initiative
  • Quality Matters (rubric is here)
  • Chico Rubric

Tools

Videoconferencing:

• Zoom.us
• Skype
• Google Hangout
• Adobe Connect

Lecture capture / Screencasting / Video Editing

• Camtasia
• Jing
• Screencast-o-matic
• Animoto

Online Collaboration Tools

• Google Docs
• Blogging > WordPress

Presentation

• Prezi
• Google Slides
• Microsoft Powerpoint

Testing / Grading

• Google Forms
• Survey Monkey
• Kahoot 

File Sharing / File Hosting

• YouTube
• Google Drive
• Google Sites
• Dropbox