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Module 2: Getting Started

When you start planning your own online course

As mentioned in the Overview, online instructors will need to overcome the lack of face-to-face (f2f) interaction with their students. We covered a few ways to reconfigure f2f teaching styles to suit the online environment. Rather than grafting every element of an f2f course into an online course in this way, you may want to rethink the way you want your students to learn the material.

What do you want students to learn from your course? What you want them to be able to do? Try to deconstruct your course to the essential skills and knowledge that you think are most important for your students.

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Elements to emphasize

• Key concepts, knowledge, and skills
• Active exercises to help students learn these concepts by doing, interacting, participating
• Assessment strategies that can measure students' mastery of these concepts

Your course can teach the same information as an f2f course on the same subject, but your lesson plans might be completely different. Instruction and assessment will focus on the core areas you believe must be mastered by your students.

When you begin to build your course website, you'll want to review the navigation needed to move from location to location to create the materials for the course. You'll need to learn how to upload course documents and files. You'll need to become familiar with discussion forums. You will need to think about the sequence of instruction and assessment. We'll discuss these ideas further as we go along.

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