Creating a Course Outline

Breaking Your Course into Topics - For a traditional course, it is not uncommon to organize lessons based upon the number of times that the course meets.  With an online course you have a greater amount of flexibility with how the material is presented.  One recommendation is to break the course up into topics.  Once topics are identified, they can be organized as necessary. For example, two weeks can be spent addressing a specific complex topic whereas two easier topics could be covered in the following week. 

Once a list of topics has been identified it is a good idea to verify that they are consistent with and support your course’s objectives.  If you have topics that are not aligned with the objectives, you may want to exclude those topics or consider adding additional objectives.

Structure - Structure can be very important for online students.  While you can cover multiple topics in a specific week, it can be beneficial to establish a consistent day and time that assignments will be due.  For example, some instructors always schedule assignments so that they are due on Monday before midnight.  This structure will help students stay up-to-date with their course responsibilities.  

Avoiding Long Lectures - When NJIT first started offering distance learning courses, faculty would record two or even three hour lectures. This approach presented a series of challenges:

  1. The material become long and difficult for the students to get through.
  2. It was not uncommon for a segment of the lecture to become out-of-date making a portion or the entire segment obsolete.
  3. During long lectures it was easy to get distracted and go on tangents – resulting in unnecessary information being included as part of the lecture.
  4. Long video files were very large and difficult to distribute.

Creating Learning Objects - Instead of creating long lectures, it is a better idea to review the course topics and break them into learning objects.  Learning objects are smaller stand-alone learning modules or chunks.  For example, instead of creating a two hour lecture it would be better to create five or six 15 minute long lectures.  The benefits to taking this approach are:

  1. It is more engaging and easier for the students to get through.
  2. If a short segment becomes out-of-date, the other learning objects are not necessarily impacted - it is also easer to redo one 15 minute segment.
  3. It is easier for a lecture to be focused and concise.
  4. Smaller files are easier to distribute and download.
  5. Learning objects are easier to reuse and share across classes/departments.

Assessment - Once the learning objects are identified and you have verified that they support the course objectives, a decision needs to be made regarding how the students’ performance will be assessed.  Any assessment item, such as a quiz or assignment, should be compared against the learning objects to ensure that the students will have access to the information required to be successful.   The next step is to determine how students will be submitting their assignments.  Will you be:

  1. Using WebCT or Moodle to collect assignments?
  2. Creating automatically graded quizzes?
  3. Requiring students to take proctored mid-terms and finals?
  4. Incorporating group projects - if so how will the groups be sharing their work with the class?

Next Step: Beginning the Course Development Phase