An adapted excerpt from Google Course Builder

 

 

Plan before you start

Before you get into the details of creating your course, take 30 minutes to think about the four following points and write down your answers. Use those answers to guide everything else; they can save you a lot of time later on:

You'll eventually spend much more than 30 minutes planning each of these points. But the areas are not independent of each other. For right now, the idea is to think quickly about all of the major points once so that you have the start of a global plan in place when you go into details for each one.

Define the problem statement and high-level goal of the course.

Think about what problem your course addresses. How will taking this course overcome that problem? Rather than thinking about what you wish your students knew, think about what problem those people have that taking this course will alleviate. Approaching the high-level problem statement and goals from this perspective helps you define a scope that is of interest to your students.

Be sure you decide both what you are trying to achieve and what you are not trying to achieve. Knowing both of those will make it much easier for you in later stages when you try to decide whether or not a given thing belongs in the course.

Identify your audience and your assumptions.

“Everyone” is not a practical audience. At the very least, limit the audience to people interested in your topic. The more specific you can be, the easier the rest is.

Think about what you expect your audience to already know. For example, assume you plan to teach a course on how to knit a sweater. Is your audience people who have never knitted before? Is it people who have learned enough knitting to create a scarf? Depending on your answer, you will cover different material in the course.

Define course objectives.

Course objectives may sound like the same thing as the problem statement and high-level goal. Actually, they are quite different. The problem statement and high-level goal are at most a 1-paragraph description of what you're doing and why. Objectives are the specifics of how you want your students to change based on having taken your course. The objectives are subservient to your problem statement and should tactically solve the larger problem statement in a measurable and observable manner.

Good objectives accomplish several things:

Consider course logistics.

How long do you want the course to be?
Presumably, you know a lot about your topic. How much of that do you want to convey? You need to balance that with...

How long is your audience willing to spend on this topic?
Your audience may be interested, but less interested than you in the topic. What you would be willing to spend weeks on, they may only be willing to spend hours on.

What pacing is appropriate? How many sessions? How many days?
For example, if you expect your audience to be people with full-time jobs, they may not have much time to spend on your course, even if they are very interested. Spreading the same number of lessons over more days may help those people. On the other hand, if you spread your lessons over too many days, your students may forget what came before and have trouble building upon it.

Will you use tutors to help you communicate with your students?
Coordinating tutors can be a large effort. On the other hand, the feeling of support your students get from the availability of real knowledgeable people to answer their questions can greatly improve their motivation.

How global are your students? Does your content differ for different cultures?
For example, if you are teaching a basic knitting course, you might want to consider that people in different communities hold knitting needles differently and consequently do the basic stitches differently. Will you teach only the method you use? Will you teach multiple methods? Will you acknowledge differences, but not teach them? We strongly recommend that you at least acknowledge differences. Otherwise, you may alienate students in those other communities.

How will you handle scheduling releases?
Will you make all content available at once? Will you release units every day or every few days? We recommend that you release portions over some specified time period, rather than all at once. This encourages a specific pacing for your students and increases the likelihood of meaningful student interactions in the forums.

How will you handle timezones?
Any time you announce dates relevant to your course, be very clear about them. If the mid-course assessment is due at a particular time, be sure to mention the timezone for that time. 21 July 2012 at 11am is not specific enough. Is that 11am in London or in Sydney? If you have a good idea where your students are, we recommend that you post dates in multiple timezones or simply post a link to a site such as [www.timeanddate.com].

How will you deal with problems?
For example, if a lesson goes live and the first set of students notice a problem, do you fix the lesson? Send email or post to the forum about it?

After the course is done, what will you do with the content?
Are you intending a one-time or recurring offering? How different will different iterations be? Do you want to retain past versions of the content or only keep the most recent one?

Once you’ve done initial planning, it’s time to move on to developing the content without technology.