Online Course Structure
As you prepare to build your online course, it will help to visualize what the online learning experience is like from both student and instructor perspectives so you can better balance its workload and pace its content.
Meet Helen
Helen is returning to college after a decade in the workforce. Online courses fit into her busy schedule of work, family, and other personal commitments. More familiar with a traditional lecture-style classroom and not particularly tech-savvy, she was very apprehensive at first about taking online courses. Fortunately, her instructor, Dr. Sandra Tovik, has been trained in online pedagogy and has designed the course Helen is taking to have a consistent layout and be simple to navigate.
On a typical weekday, Helen drops into the course over her lunch break. The first thing she does is click the Grades link in the Assessments menu of the course navbar to see how she did on last week’s assignments and read any feedback left for her by Dr. Tovik. Satisfied with her progress, she clicks the Content link in the navbar to see that this week’s module has been made available. She has to run out to do a quick errand before her lunch break is over, so she just quickly scans the Module Description of what Dr. Tovik expects for the week and the sequence of readings, activities, and videos in the module in order to start planning how she’ll use her time to tackle the material over the next few days.
After a long day of work, Helen settles down that evening with her laptop and logs into Dr. Tovik’s course. She re-reads the module description for the week and presses the first video’s Play button. Despite having normal hearing, Helen turns on the video’s captions while watching it because they help her focus. Somewhere around the second reading for the week, Helen nods off for a moment. Suddenly aware of the time, she closes her laptop and heads to bed. The rest of Helen’s week proceeds in a similar fashion: She uses the little scraps of spare time she has to progress a little further in the material for the week.
The weekend is when Helen really gets stuff done. On Saturday morning, she quickly scans all the readings and videos just to refresh her memory and dives more deeply into the things she did not have time to interact with during the week. Also, she’s been thinking on and off over the week about the lesson topic and materials and how she would respond in this week’s activities. By Sunday evening, she has submitted her work for the week and is ready to begin this process again on Monday.
Meet Dr. Tovik
Dr. Sandra Tovik is an adjunct instructor who currently divides her time working for a local non-profit and teaching online courses for the university. The time she spends on her courses goes through various phases throughout the week. Much like her students, she quickly checks in during weekdays to field questions via email and to stimulate conversation in the course discussion boards. On weekends, she carves out a block of time for more time-consuming tasks: giving feedback on high-stakes assignments, monitoring overall activity to identify struggling students and reach out to them, and recording a short video that synthesizes the past week’s activity and prepares students for the next week.
Dr. Tovik’s priority throughout the week is to grade smaller, frequent weekly assignments. She sees these as the “engine” of her course that helps her not only gauge where her students’ understanding is but also how to move it forward through lots of feedback. When students submit assignments and it’s clear their understanding isn’t where it should be, Dr. Tovik lets them know what areas need improvement, offers suggestions, and allows them to re-submit revised versions. She keeps these assignments very small—usually only a single question or task—so the idea of revising and re-submitting work doesn’t seem daunting to students.
Dr. Tovik is aware of how busy many of her students are, so she makes an effort to select fairly short readings or ones that are a synthesis of much longer works. She also makes an effort to accentuate and present the key concepts for the week repeatedly in multiple formats to guarantee that even if one form doesn’t communicate its message to a student, another form will. However, her students are having trouble with this week’s key concepts for some reason. She has received several messages from students with questions about it. Rather than spend time answering them all, she decides this is a great opportunity to do an impromptu, optional live session over Zoom to answer questions and elaborate more on the topic. She sends an announcement letting all of her students know that she will host the session that evening and that it will be recorded and posted to the course for those who can’t join it.
The fact that so many students have similar questions about this topic tells her that the content she is using is not doing what it’s supposed to. After sending the announcement, Dr. Tovik opens up a “course journal” she keeps as a Google Doc and leaves a note for herself to re-evaluate and revise the content for that topic before the next term.
Suggested Course Structure
When you design your course, there are two things to keep in mind: consistency and simplicity. You want to keep the amount of clicking and searching students have to do to at an absolute minimum. The energy students spend trying to navigate your course is energy that they could be spending interacting with your course material. The Course Structure diagram illustrates our suggested organization scheme for courses running in Brightspace.
The left side of the diagram lists the links that would appear in the left column in Brightspace's Content tool. We recommend that you keep the links in this menu as minimal as possible. This will reduce the chance of your students getting lost and keep your course’s organization consistent. Let’s go over each of the links in the Course Structure diagram.
Things Brightspace Does For You
There is no need to create "modules-by-type" in the Content tool. In other words, don't create a module named "Assignments" and put links to all of the course's assignments in it. This is already done automatically for you and your students by virtue of the tools in the Assessments menu, shown to the right.
Course announcements are displayed right on the course's landing page, which is the first thing students see when they go to your course.
Syllabus
The syllabus is the most important document in your course. It communicates to students what you expect from them and also serves as a blueprint you can reference while building your course. There is a ton of standard policy and student service information that has to be included in every course syllabus. CTEL has done the hard work of gathering the latest versions of this information and compiled it into a template for you to copy and use as a base for your own syllabus.
Visit the CTEL Syllabus Template page on our website for more information and to access the latest version of the template. The CTEL Brightspace Guide has a section devoted to the different ways you can post your Syllabus in Brightspace, complete with screenshots and video demonstrations. Read the Post Your Syllabus in Brightspace section of the CTEL Brightspace Guide.
Weekly Modules
This where most of the action happens! Think of a "module" as a folder containing all of the things your students will need for that week. Your students click a module link to access weekly course materials and assignment instructions, which are organized as links to external websites, media, and documents. Don’t feel constrained by a weekly organization scheme, though. You can organize your content into units instead with the expectation that students will work through each one over more than one week. Going this latter route is a good choice if there’s a chance your course may need to be offered in terms of different lengths, i.e., scaled from a 15-week term to a 7- or 4-week term. Whatever you choose to do, just be sure you clearly communicate to your students how your sequence works.
Inside of each week/unit module are the actual course materials, which are represented in the diagram above in the "Structure of a Typical Weekly Module" box. Before adding a parade of videos and articles, be deliberate about sequencing your materials in the order in which students should interact with them. (Ideally, you’ll use this same sequence consistently throughout your course.) Use the Module Description field to provide a week/unit overview. Think of it as being similar to an abstract in a piece of scholarly literature that contextualizing the week’s topic for students. It should also include a list of learning objectives for the week and/or your suggested sequence for completing that week’s tasks.
Beneath your week/unit overview, your want to add links to media for students to consume, as well as links to activities you would like students to accomplish. The middle two arrow boxes in the "Structure of a Typical Weekly Module" box, (titled “Course Content” and “Assignments”) have green arrows arcing across each other. This represents how we suggest you organize your content and activities. Your instinct may be to first list all of the week/topic’s videos and readings, followed by its assignments, quizzes, etc. This is perfectly reasonable if the content is fairly light. However, you’ll want to intersperse things for your students to actively do within your course materials in most cases. Here are some examples:
If you would normally have a single assignment with twenty questions, break it up into two or more smaller assignments focused on a specific sub-topic that are dispersed in between relevant content. This will also help you better see which topics students are struggling with.
If you use a lot of video, you can take advantage of Kaltura’s quizzing feature. This will stop the video at prescribed points and show your students questions you’ve created. Students’ scores on a Kaltura video quiz are automatically recorded into your course’s gradebook.
The reason we suggest this strategy is to make your material feel more manageable to your students. It naturally allows them to tackle a large, otherwise daunting topic in small bites, giving them a sense of accomplishment that fuels their persistence in your course.
The last arrow box in the Course Structure diagram, “Feedback Opportunities,” refers to what you get from those assignments you interspersed within your content. Each one that your students turn in is an opportunity for you to give students one-on-one attention. Some instructors with face-to-face classroom teaching experience lament the loss of student interaction and the “feeling” of teaching. Providing frequent, meaningful, one-on-one feedback is a great way to find that gratification in the online teaching environment.
That said, several assignments per week multiplied by the number of students in your class equals a LOT of grading and feedback. Fortunately, you can employ the following strategies to make this more manageable:
Use a rubric. It can make grading faster, communicate your expectations for assignments to students, and ensure your scores are more fair and consistent. Brightspace allows you to integrate a rubric into your assignments, which includes descriptors of criteria quality.
Document your feedback. As you go through a course, you will see patterns in student understanding. Keep a document where you collect the feedback you write to students so you can re-use it for duplicate cases.
Add feedback responses for quiz questions. Brightspace’s quizzes tool allows you to add canned feedback to both correct and incorrect answers for each question. If students select an incorrect answer, you can have feedback that explains why the answer is wrong and direct students to resources to improve their understanding.
Continuously improve your course. Pay attention to the patterns you see in your students’ understanding. If they struggle with a topic, it may indicate that you need to enhance or replace parts of your content so that it does a better job presenting the topic.
Hold live sessions. For endemic misunderstandings in a content area, you can do what Dr. Tovik did and hold an optional live session with our video conferencing software, Zoom. Be sure to record your session and post it to Brightspace so students who couldn’t attend benefit from it as well!
By leveraging these strategies, features in Brightspace, and other software, you can keep your workload manageable while still helping all of your students succeed. Below you will find some relevant links to parts of our Brightspace Guide that will show you how to do some of the things mentioned on this page:
Conclusion
We know there is a lot to absorb here, and we hope that reading a narrative of how online courses work from both student and instructor perspectives helps you design your own course. Please remember that CTEL’s Learning Designers can help if you have questions or if you’d like to learn how to use new Brightspace features or other software. Drop us an e-mail via ctelhelp@maine.edu
Image Credits
The “Helen” icon, made by monkik from www.flaticon.com, is licensed by CC 3.0 BY and was modified by Mike Matis.
The “Dr. Sandra Tovik” and desk icons, made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com, are licensed by CC 3.0 BY.
The “Laptop” icon, made by Icon Pond from www.flaticon.com, is licensed by CC 3.0 BY and was modified by Mike Matis.
Written by Michael P. Matis
Last updated on May 21, 2021