Your Guide to a Successful Online Course: Course Design

Having a strong course design is critical to the success of your class.

Jul 24, 2020

Your Guide to a Successful Online Course: Course Design

Having a strong course design is critical to the success of your class. As the roadmap and foundation of your course, your design will determine your course’s overall purpose and goals, as well as how to best get students actively involved and engaged.

This second article of our series will cover the Course Design section of the Every Learner Everywhere playbook, featuring:

Overarching concepts to keep in mind as you plan out your course
A step-by-step process you can use to develop your curriculum

First, here are some overarching concepts:

Design with Student Perspective in mind

“When teachers are designing lessons, units, or courses, they often focus on the activities and instruction rather than the outputs… This perspective can lead to the misconception that learning is the activity when, in fact, learning is derived from a careful consideration of the meaning of the activity” — Understanding by Design

A student-centered approach is important for engaging students and making sure they reach course goals. Carnegie Mellon offers some teaching principles that can guide you in finding the right approach:

Understand your students’ backgrounds: Each student is different, and their backgrounds can directly affect how they learn. How do they perceive things? How do they process and solve problems? How much experience do they have in the subject? Being aware of the traits your students posses will help you gear your course in a direction that will fit them best.
Be aware of the “expert blind spot”: As a professional, foundational principles and procedures like understanding theorems or finding appropriate steps needed to solve problems come naturally. But students don’t have the same experience and knowledge; breaking down concepts into fundamental parts is essential to building the right foundations and knowledge they need.
Adapt your role as a teacher to your goals: You can shift your role in the class to match course goals. Want to develop students’ skills in defending their arguments? Take a role that questions them and challenges their claims. Want to develop their skills in communicating with others? Try a facilitator/moderator role.

Ultimately, what your students process and understand will determine the success of your course. Gearing things towards their perspective will set up an environment that students can best learn in.

Align your course components

A course usually has these three basic pillars:

Learning goals: What do you want your students to ultimately take away from your course?
Feedback and assessment: How would students show that they’ve achieved the learning goals?
Teaching and learning activities: What activities would help students understand and be actively involved in the course?

Though having strong individual components is important, strong alignment between all components is even more vital. Each part must align and link to each other — activities should support assessments, assessments should support learning goals, learning goals should support activities, and vice versa.

There are several different course design strategies you can use that help you align these three components, but we’ll be focusing on one particular strategy: Backward Design.

Backward Design

Traditionally, classes are designed by choosing what activities to do first, then what assessments to give, then the two are linked to learning goals. Backward design reverses this order, following this structure:

Create learning goals
Determine assessments
Plan class activities

Designing your course can be daunting due to the thousands of course component combinations and options available to you, and using the traditional method, there’s a chance that the tasks you select won’t quite align with your learning goals.

Backward design helps cut through all the complexity and choices, focusing things down to one idea: what do I want my students to achieve, and what would best help them get there? By setting up end goals first, you’ll be creating guiding principles that encompass and focus your curriculum, making it easier to find the right activities and assessments. Each part of your class will have a direct purpose and lead towards your objectives, resulting in a unified, meaningful, and cohesive course.

Here’s how to use this powerful design structure:

1. Create Learning Goals

Learning goals are the roots of your course — they define what your students will ultimately take away by the end, and what they can do with the information they learned.

The best goals are clear, direct, and can be assessed. To start, a basic learning goal should include:

VERB + OBJECT

Your verb should be a measurable action verb, and the object should be what skill or behavior you want to be performed.

Choosing the right verbs for your course’s learning goals is critical — they’ll help make your goals assessable and clear. The Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is a tool that can help you select the right words:

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Designed by Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchy that ranks level of thinking and educational achievement into six categories. As you go up the pyramid, you’ll reach higher and higher levels of thinking. Vanderbilt University describes each level as:

Remember: Recall facts and basic concepts
Understand: Explain ideas or concepts
Apply: Use information in new situations
Analyze: Draw connections among ideas
Evaluate: Justify a stand or decision
Create: Produce new or original work

Each level has a list of verbs that relate to that level of thinking — those are the verbs that should be used in the learning goals.

You can determine what verbs to choose by looking at your course difficulty. Have a more beginner-oriented class? Verbs from the lower groups like define, explain, or identify might fit your course best. Have a class of experts? Verbs from the upper groups like construct, author, or defend would work well.

After selecting your verb, put the skill you want your students to achieve next to it, and you have your goal.

A couple more points to remember while creating your learning objectives are:

Avoid writing the subject matter/activities as the object: Learning goals describe what we want students to do with the information rather than just the activity itself. For example, “students should be able to know photosynthesis” simply describes the subject to be learned, while “students should be able to label the steps of photosynthesis” describes an assessable product of learning about photosynthesis.
Make goals easy to measure: Measure-able goals specify behaviors that can be seen — opt for goals that a student can physically do or say rather than think or feel.

Here are some examples of real learning objectives from Carnegie Mellon University:

Students should be able to articulate a clear and comprehensive architectural concept which is verified during design development. (Architectural Composition)
Students should be able to create presentation quality 2-D CAD drawings from scratch. (Grad Computer Applications)
The student should describe and discuss musical concepts using the standard terminology of the Western art music tradition. (Basic Harmony I)

2. Determine Assessments

With learning goals in place, the next step is to plan your assessments. These are the tools you’ll be using to measure whether students have reached the goals you’ve set.

Options for assessments are slightly different in an online setting than in an in-person setting. Academic integrity can be harder to enforce online, so using methods other than staples such as multiple-choice tests can help maintain accountability and fairness.

The next article will cover types of assessments and online alternatives in greater detail, but in the meantime, the Course Map Guide offers a list of assessment options for face-to-face courses and blended learning:

Formative (ongoing through the unit): quizzes, surveys, discussions, journal reflections, summaries, write-ups, peer/self assessments, group collaborations, case studies, photos, artwork, videos
Summative (end of the unit): essays, research papers, projects, reports, recordings, recitations, presentations, demonstration, final exams, portfolios

3. Create Activities

The final step in the backward design path is planning learning experiences and activities. During ERT (Emergency Remote Teaching), activities used for in-person classes can also be used online, but as the course further develops, adding activities that promote active learning and are backed up by the learning sciences would be beneficial.

What’s Active Learning?

According to the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement, active learning happens when “students… actively construct their knowledge.” Since the definition is broad, several activities can go under this active learning umbrella. According to a study by Vanderbilt University,

“… active learning is commonly defined as activities that students do to construct knowledge and understanding…[and] do higher order thinking. Although not always explicitly noted, metacognition — students’ thinking about their own learning — is an important element…

Active learning gets students involved in the course — rather than passively listening, students take control of their learning and stay engaged and focused.

Here are a few assessment and activity examples that CLASSUM can help with:

Tips for Using CLASSUM in Assessments and Activities

While planning your class, it’s important to be familiar with your tools. CLASSUM is an interactive learning platform focused on communication and dedicated to increasing student engagement. Some of our main features include easy, writing-less interactions and anonymous posting so students can be more motivated to participate. (Admin will be able to see who posted unless set otherwise).

You can use CLASSUM for activities ranging in scope from individual assignments to whole-class discussions:

Whole-Class

Socratic seminars, debates, and discussions

Using the Notice or Note feature, post the seminar or debate topic along with the questions, rules, and any other information you’d like to include. At the designated time, conduct the debate! Have students use the “like” feature next to comments to show support for arguments they agree with.

Lectures

You can host lectures synchronously and asynchronously on CLASSUM. Use the Zoom integration to easily and quickly host live courses — once you start your session, students can simply click “Join Live Session” to join the call. For asynchronous lectures, you can post any type of file or video on a Notice, Note, or Question. Members can also ask and answer each other’s questions in real time while they watch uploaded videos.

Feedback

Don’t wait until the end of the semester for feedback — use the Feedback or Survey features to ask class members for their opinions, topics they need more support on, and more. Feedback can be both anonymous or set to display the person’s name.

Small Group

Group work (Case studies, decision-making activities, group projects)

Split class members into small groups and post a real world case, problem, or project for each group to tackle (or have each group choose a topic on their own). Use Categories to easily organize groups’ posts and make it easy to find all their work in one place.

Panels and Symposiums

Have each group become “experts” on a given topic and upload a video about their topic for others to watch and ask questions on. You can also use the Zoom integration for a live panel or symposium, and post the recording through the Note feature afterward.

Individual

Self-assessments

Using the Feedback feature, post questions for students to answer. Since it’s a self-assessment, setting responses to anonymous will make sure students don’t feel stressed about making mistakes or not knowing the answer. If TA’s are available, have them check student responses and help if students have questions or need a hint.

(These are only a couple examples of how you can use CLASSUM — if you have any other questions about our features or how you can integrate our platform into your course, please contact us!)

Accessibility and the Universal Design for Learning

The pandemic has clearly shown the fact that we cannot neglect students with different learning needs. Being online cut several students from the support they need, and it’s critical that we design our classes to make it so that each person has the best chance to learn.

The final section covered in the Course Design section of the playbook is UDL, or Universal Design for Learning, as well as tips for making your course as accessible as possible to as many people.

What’s UDL?

With the goal to create “expert learners,” UDL helps you accommodate and plan for a variety of different learners.

There have been several studies showing that students’ learning habits are as diverse as their fingerprints, so keeping UDL in mind while creating your course will help you account for these differences, and will save a lot of work in the future.

UDL doesn’t only target those with special needs. For instance, not only does adding closed captions to lecture videos help those with hearing impairments, but it also helps English learners or even students in busy cafes who forgot their earbuds.

UDL is all about accessibility and adapting your class for multiple needs, so it suggests you provide multiple methods for your coursework as follows:

Representation: Students process information differently and have different strengths — provide information in multiple formats. A textbook can be great a visual resource for students, but supplementing it with more styles like audio or hands-on activities can help the different learners in your environment.
Action and expression: Students have different ways of approaching and expressing learning — offer several different activity and assessment options. To list a couple of examples, you can give students a choice between assignments like creating a webpage, drawing diagrams, or making a podcast.
Engagement: Students are inspired and motivated by different things — find different methods to engage them. You can try varying activities to match with different cultures, or offer different environments in your classroom to accommodate those who like working alone and those who like working in groups.

Though it may be hard to implement these guidelines especially during earlier stages of your design, as you continue to refine your course (or as you’re re-designing your class for the new semester), keeping the UDL guidelines in mind should set you and your students up for success in the future.

To increase accessibility on our part, CLASSUM is aligning our platform with the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) so that everybody can participate to their fullest potential. Learn more about WCAG and increasing accessibility in your class here.

Summary

To quickly recap the article:

Design your courses with a student-centered mindset
Align learning goals, assessments, and learning activities
Backward design can help with this alignment — the steps are:

Create learning goals: use the verb+object format and Bloom’s Taxonomy to craft clear and concise objectives
Assessments: Select assessments that can prove the achievement of learning goals
Activities: Use activities that can help reach your learning goals

4. Consider the UDL guidelines while designing to increase accessibility

In the next part of the series, we’ll cover specific tools you can use to implement your newly created course design.