Course Structure
A good course structure will improve usability, reduce support issues, and empower your students to learn more while searching through your class less.
Developing Your Structure
Students are accustomed to a weekly routine or structure in an academic course. We recommend you keep this convention in your online course as well. However you choose to organize your content, strive for simplicity and straightforwardness in structure. Be sure to explain what students should expect to learn in each unit, as well as how the content and assignments you post will help them reach these goals. Experience has shown that if your guiding “voice” is missing here, students will often miss important steps or connections.
In this video Carson Waites of ODE will walk you through building an effective and easy to navigate structure for your online course. You'll learn about building a course menu, folder structure, and overviews for your learning modules. The two guides below will also be useful as you build your course.
Office Hours and Faculty Contact
Office Hours
You can use a live collaboration tool like Zoom to manage office hours with your students. It has a feature that allows you to hold students in a waiting room and admit them as you see fit in order to protect their privacy.
Watch (4min): Video walkthrough on setting up Zoom for office hours
Faculty Contact
Your students want to get to know you. A great way to initiate this is to write up a short bio about yourself and post it in the faculty contact area. Don’t forget to include your preferred contact information and office hours.
Presentation: Develop and upload your faculty contact information.
Example Module Structure
Overview
(What will students learn in this module? How does it relate to material that has been covered so far? Also, be sure to explain what students are supposed to do with the content you post in this module, such as readings, PowerPoints, videos. This is your chance to set expectations, and avoid potential confusion.)
Learning Objectives
(At the conclusion of this module, students will be able to...)
Readings/Resources
(Chapters/Articles/Videos)
Activities
(Discussion board. Define topic. Describe how it will be covered and assessed.)
(Assignment title and due date. Assignment details and rubric can be added to assignment link)
(Test and dates of availability)
FOLDER: Lecture Material/Multimedia
(A folder containing the specific lecture material, multimedia, and other learning assets you’d like your students to cover in this unit.)
FOLDER: Assignments and Assessments
(A folder containing a quiz, exam, paper, assignment, or any other items you’d like to use to assess learning outcomes.)
Course Template
Our team has developed a template that you can import to get started with structuring an online course. It contains an example module, ‘how to’ resources, and grading rubrics. If you would like to enroll to look at the course, follow these instructions.
Review the template:
Log in to Blackboard and click the Courses tab at the top of the page.
In the Course Search box at the top left of the screen, enter the name Blackboard Module Template and click Go.
When you see the course, click the arrow next to it and select Enroll.
Click Submit.
The course should now be available in your course list.
Import the template:
To import the template into your course, follow these instructions.
Download the zip file containing the module: Blackboard_Sample_Module.zip
Enter the course into which you will be importing the module.
Click Packages and Utilities on the Control Panel menu.
Choose Import Package / View Logs on the expanded menu.
Click the Import Package button.
Click the Browse My Computer button and locate the .zip file containing the module.
Click Select All under the Select Course Materials heading.
Click Submit.
The new content will be added to your course within minutes.