How To Create & Teach An Online Course

Instructional Design Certificate (Fully Online)

This fully online program is for anyone developing and/or teaching an online course. Learn the latest developments in instructional design for online education and employ a variety of multimedia technology tools to design, create and evaluate engaging learning experiences.

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ADDIE Instructional Design Certificate Program (Fully Online)

This fully online program is designed for individuals interested in learning more about the ADDIE model. The purpose of this course is to provide trainers/teachers with the fundamental skills in instructional design needed to develop successful training events.

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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