When tasked with designing an online course, you might feel overwhelmed and wonder where to start. If you’ve taught the course in the face-to-face environment, you probably have a sense of the strengths of the course, the components that you want to ensure carry over to the online course, but you might not be sure how those activities or assignments can be imitated online. If you’ve never taught the course before, you might be wondering what the very first step ought to be. In this case, the best place to start is at the end: the students' learning outcomes.
Think about what you want your students to walk away from the course knowing. What are the essential skills you want them to develop? Stating these goals in your own terms can be a helpful way to start planning. Wiggins & Tighe (2005) promote a course design framework known as backward design. In essence, this framework asks you to think about the end learning goals before you think about the texts and assignments. Once you know what you want your students to learn, you will start filling in the details. This method ensures that you aren’t filling up your course with busy work.
Once you've figured out precisely what your students' learning goals are, you will need to work on phrasing those goals using measurable verbs. While we might want students to learn to appreciate the intricacies of various art forms, "appreciation" is not measured easily. Bloom's Taxonomy of Measurable Verbs can help you align different kinds of learning assessments with the appropriate cognitive level.
You've figured out what you want your students to achieve, but now it's time for a check. How will you determine if they met those goals? Checking yourself now will ensure that your ambitions for your students are indeed achievable. Summative assessments, which are typically the heavier weighted assignments, will help both you and your students evaluate their learning. What will their major projects involve? When will those be due? Are there ways to chunk those assignments into smaller parts so that students complete several smaller portions over the course of a couple of months? For more on designing summative assessments, see How do I design meaningful activities and assessments?.
The next step is to start thinking about how you can help your students acquire the knowledge and develop the skills that they’ll need to perform well on those summative assessments. At this stage, you’ll need to start considering the learning materials you will present to them and the learning activities that they will complete as a means of practicing these skills. You probably already have a sense of the texts that you'd like to use, so now it's time to figure out how to present that content in a way that will help your students achieve those larger goals. Try using a course map to plan your course. It should help you align clearly your end goals with the materials, activities, and assessments students will complete in each learning module.
Darby, F., & Lang, J. (2019). Small Teaching Online. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
“Standards from the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric, 6th Edition." Retrieved from https://www.qualitymatters.org/sites/default/files/PDFs/StandardsfromtheQMHigherEducationRubric.pdf
Shabatura, J. (2013). Using Bloom's taxonomy to write effective learning objectives. Retrieved from https://tips.uark.edu/using-blooms-taxonomy/
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ASCD
If you use any information from this site, please cite it appropriately:
UWG Center for Teaching & Learning. (2021, August 17). Where do I start ? start at the end! UWG Online Teaching Faculty Toolkit.https://sites.google.com/westga.edu/onlineteachingfacultytoolkit/online-teaching-faculty-toolkit