Getting Started with Course Design
How to Create a Quality Course
Start with a Course Map
Creating a quality course map is the first step to creating a quality course. What is a course map? A course map is a visual representation of your course. You may also know it as curriculum alignment or an assessment audit. This is where you will plan out your course setup including course and module-level objectives, instructional materials, learning activities, and assessments.
Choose your preferred format for completing the course map:
Keep going with the Quality Assurance Template
Learning Technologies has created Quality Assurance templates for seven, 12, and 16 week courses in Canvas. These templates are available to all faculty and are intended to set your online course up for success by automating some of the course setup process. For example, the Getting Started module contains everything you need to introduce students to your online course, including information about you and your syllabus, how to utilize technical support, and how to access various student services on and off campus.
View the templates:
Writing Your Learning Objectives
Think of your learning objectives as the backbone of your class, as they provide a framework for everything else in your course to be built on.
For a quality course, your learning objectives should be:
Measurable
Stated clearly and written from the learner's perspective
Tied to learning activities and assessments and prominently located in the course
Suited to the level of the course
How can you write learning objectives that meet all of this criteria? The place to start is with Bloom's taxonomy. There are several visual representations of Bloom's out there; one representation that works well for some of our team is from the University of Utah.
If you need help with this step, you can always contact a learning designer or check out some learning objective builders to help you craft your objectives. Those provided by Arizona State University and the University of Central Florida are both great!
The Importance of Alignment
What do we mean by alignment? Alignment is the connection between your objectives, your course activities, and your assessments. All of these should fit together and strengthen your course. According to Quality Matters in their Rubric Workbook: Standards for Course Design, "The concept of alignment is intended to convey the idea that critical course components work together to ensure that learners achieve the desired learning outcomes. Measurable course and module-level learning objectives or competencies form the basis of alignment in a course." (QM, 2018)
Assessments
Assessments are the systematic process of documenting and using empirical data to measure knowledge, skills, attitudes,and beliefs. If you have measurable learning objectives for your students to meet, you will also need a way to measure them. This is where assessment comes in.
Assessments can come in the form of quizzes, tests, papers, projects, discussion boards, etc. These assessments should align with the course and module-level objectives by "measuring the accomplishment of those objectives or competencies." (QM, 2018)
Consider using the Rice University Center for Teaching Excellence workload calculator to determine the number and type of assessments you should include in your course.
Instructional Materials and Learning Activities
If learning objectives and assessment are the why and the what of course design, instructional materials,and learning activities are the how. These two concepts should also be aligned within the course and module-level objectives by "contributing to the achievement of those objectives or competencies and by integrating effectively with the tools, assessments, and learning activities selected for the course." (QM, 2018)
Instructional Materials
For instructional materials, it is important to ensure that your materials:
Are aligned within the larger course system
Alignment is clearly explained to all learners
Represent the most up-to-date theory and practice
Support academic integrity by modeling appropriate source references and permissions
Are varied enough in a presentation to support different student learning styles
Learning Activities
As stated by Quality Matters, the "purpose of learning activities is to facilitate the learner's achievement of the stated objectives or competencies." (QM, 2018) For learning activities, it is important to consider what kind of interaction each activity promotes. Is it between the learner and the course materials? The learner and their co-learners? The learner and their instructor? Your course should contain a variety of types of learning activities and promote each of the types of interaction in order to be successful.
Course Technology and Learner Support
This segment also gets into the "how" of course design. Course technology is a necessary addition to online learning and there are a lot of options out there for faculty to use. What contributes to the success of an online course is ensuring that the course technology is focused and specifically chosen to support the learning objectives. In layman's terms: Don't use technology just to use technology. Make sure it's the right technology for what it is you're trying to teach and for improving your students' understanding of the topic.
Course technology and learner support are also heavily supported by the Quality Assurance template. All of the necessary learner support information is included in the template, and students are also provided with information on how various course tech uses and protects their privacy.
Accessibility
Accessibility is another area where use of the Quality Assurance template helps do some of the heavy lifting for faculty as they design their courses. The template encourages ease of use, readability, accessible fonts, document remediation (through Blackboard A11y), and provides vendor accessibility statements without faculty having to locate and organize this material themselves.
Faculty will still need to focus on making sure that all text, images, web pages, and multimedia are accessible. This can take the form of alt text for images, searchable PDFs, captions and transcripts, table setup, and font choices that are optimized for use with screen magnifiers and screen readers.
Conclusion
So there you have it! Several things to consider when designing a quality online course. Is this list exhaustive? Of course not! But if you keep these topics in mind while you're creating your course (and utilize the Quality Assurance template from Learning Technologies) you'll be well on the way to a course you can be proud of and a class your students can succeed in.