Moving a course from brick-and-mortar to online requires rethinking how you deliver content, replicate in-class interactions and pinpoint areas for improvement.
When you’re converting a traditional face-to-face course to online, while a lot of the content may remain the same, the way it’s delivered and learned will, understandably, undergo change. A “mastery series” from the Online Learning Consortium (OLC), focused on instructional design, teaches the fundamentals of course design for effective online learning. Recently, longtime instructional designer Elisabeth Stucklen, one of the facilitators for the course, shared five areas to pay attention to as classes are being shifted to an online mode.
1) Start with Outcomes in Mind
Don’t underestimate the value of pre-planning, said Stucklen. It begins by developing a course outcomes matrix, a list of “well-written” learning objectives that express what you want students to achieve by the end of the course, the strategies you’re going to use to address them and how you’re going to measure whether they’ve been learned or not.