Easy By Design

In course organization, routine and documentation are crucial. 

Podcaster Merlin Mann pointed out that "a lack of infrastructure is also why nearly all New Year's resolutions fail. Human will is a lot like a new locomotive; it's basically useless without the rails, controls, and signals that make the right thing the easy thing."  This is good advice for pedagogy, too.  

If students find a fairly consistent format with clearly described, predictable activities each week, they can focus on the things, the substance of your course and discipline, that you know are most important.

Great Directions

Regardless of discipline, good online courses have great directions for students: concise but thorough, and easy to find.

You can repeat important instructions in several places throughout your course. After all, think how often you have repeated yourself in a face-to-face classroom! But choose carefully and consistently how you repeat yourself in online materials, since making a change can be big work if you must do it in various course materials. Remember that, so long as they can easily find the information they need, students can reread or rewatch it.

Certainly, you should bring over some of your assignment instructions, procedural directions and examples from your F2F course. But consider how you may need to recreate certain things so they are clear in web-only communication.

Not All At Once-? 

D2L has tools that allow you to store content in your course space, but not yet have it available to your students.  Among other reasons, this is useful because you can have your course content deploy or become available to students at intervals throughout the course.  For example, you may have weekly course content and activities appear to students every Monday morning.  In this model, students are compelled to live in the present, and engage with a relevant part of the course as a whole class.  Students are unable to race ahead, completing work before they've properly reflected upon it. 

Use Start and End Dates on Items (ex. Modules, Dropboxes, Discussions) Within Courses  (Transcript) to pre-program content availability in your course.  If you want to manually open course content yourself, you can use Basic Visibility controls in Content (Hidden vs. Visible.)   

On the other hand, perhaps you are teaching more mature students who you are sure will not race ahead, do a shabby job, and remain fairly disengaged with your course.  Or, you might wish to allow or encourage them to work ahead, so they can do the coursework around their busy professional lives.  In this case, you may have most or all of your course available to them on the first day.  

Either option is available to you, and you can decide how to use visibility controls in your course, depending on it's content, student demographic, discipline, and other factors.