Leverage existing materials, try to find existing pieces rather than creating your own
Incorporate visual elements and hierarchy in your course design
Consider how you will be present in the course and how to incorporate student presences in the course
As you prepare for online teaching it serves to evaluate what existing and shared resources exist. While you may want to develop your own materials, leveraging existing content can help ensure that your course is accessible by providing content in various formats, or approaches. Additionally existing resources may provide excellent examples of online assessments, or sources of inspiration.
When designing your online course page, you will want to consider the navigability of the course page. Leveraging principles of visual hierarchy can help students track key points, manage deadlines, and easily find what they're looking for on a course page. When using Moodle you may want to use headings, colour, and labels to break up the course page. Another approach may be having a course topic set up with just the course deadlines.
Moodle Labels and Organization
What Students Want: A Simple, Navigable LMS Course Design - Faculty Focus
When teaching an online course an important element is often bringing the human element forward. An online course is not just the content and activities run on a website, but the experiences of the students, the relationships, and feedback from the course instructor. You may want to incorporate some practices that highlight student contributions, such as a weekly summary video. One approach that may be helpful may be considering pedagogies of care as well.
As with many other new endeavours there is the potential to go too hard. When planning your course also plan how to take care of yourself. When running video sessions or recording lectures remember that these can often feel more draining than live lectures and the asynchronous nature of a lot of online teaching can mean discussions, questions, and submissions around the clock. Make sure to give yourself permission to log off, set boundaries, and recharge.
Self-Care for Online Instructors
Resilient Pedagogy - Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction
If you are used to teaching in a lecture style face-to-face setting, you may not be used to having to actively plan the pacing in the course as regular scheduled meetings set a pace on your behalf. In an online or hybrid course you may have to put some thought to how keep students together and help students from falling behind or feeling overwhelmed. Consider your communication plan for the course, regular communication is one way to set the pacing in your course and can provide students a flow or schedule. Regular agendas of the coursework and upcoming deadlines are a great addition to a regular communication.
One tool that may be helpful for helping students keep on track is the Moodle Calendar. Having deadlines and reminders set up in the calendar can help students who are using that tool for managing their schedules. Additionally you may choose to help keep things paced through the design and layout of your course. Creating a bulleted list in a course section or including a course timeline can help students keep track of what is coming up. You may also leverage your section layout, using restrict access to manage the pace with something like the Restricted Reverse Chronological course layout.