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Welcome Wilmette Institute course developers and instructors!

The Wilmette Institute (WI) upholds high standards for its courses. Striving for excellence in each course and in all of the related administrative processes for over 25 years has taught us that perhaps the most essential elements are the course developers and instructors. This site provides guidance and support for course developers and instructors. Adherence to this guidance will achieve the consistency and uniformity among the courses necessary to build trust among participants that their experience at WI will be high quality. Flexibility is also built into this guidance to allow developers and instructors to express their unique capacities through each course.

Beyond basic design principles, this guide provides background information and orientation about time management, content selection, technology, and methodology. There is great diversity among our course developers and instructors, many of whom are developing a course for the first time. For this reason, we encourage all developers and instructors to achieve enough familiarity with the contents on this site to design courses that conform to WI's standards of excellence. We have made a concerted effort to keep the reading on this site concise for your convenience.

Please note that this site only addresses WI's community learning courses. Credit courses for university students will be addressed elsewhere.

WI is eager to continue evolving by offering a wider variety of courses, and your interest in contributing to this process is greatly valued.

Getting Started for Course Developers

  1. Carefully read through the pages on this site in the order they are presented.

  2. Fill in the "Survey for Course Developers and Instructors" to indicate comprehension and compliance with the guidance.

  3. If you are reading this, it is most likely that the Wilmette Institute has reached out to you to develop a course or help reconceptualize an existing course. Either way, to begin you will be asked to fill in the "Course Development Template". A curriculum team will be assigned to provide support and feedback to you during this process. Once the course is finished and approved, we will upload it to Moodle and go live on the designated start date. Similar to publishing in an academic journal, this feedback and approval process could happen quickly if there is a high degree of agreement between WI and the course developer(s).


Revised: 06/23/2022