An adapted excerpt from Google Course Builder

 

 

Develop content without technology

After you have taken a few minutes to plan, it’s time to start developing. It’s extremely tempting to just dive in and start recording videos and writing assessments and so on. But if you do that, you can create a course that doesn’t make sense and that doesn’t satisfy your primary goal or any of the supplementary objectives you planned. That said, even though we recommend you do initial development without using the technology, there are aspects of the final delivery method that should influence your development strategy.

In the first parts of development you expand on the information you determined during the planning phase. After that, you get down to deciding precisely what you want students to learn and how you’ll get them to do that:

Clarify your goals and non-goals for the course.

This is an expansion of what you did in the planning step, but at a more detailed level. For example:

Clarify your assumptions about your students.

Again, this is an expansion of what you did in the planning step. For example:

If your course truly is “massive”, the number of students guarantees a diversity that you may not expect. It can be difficult to balance how much allowance to make for that diversity. If you expect an international audience, you need to clarify any differences in the content for audiences from different cultures.

For example, 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?

Whatever you decide, in a situation like this you should consider explicitly telling your students that what you will teach is only one way (or a few ways) to do whatever it is, and that there are other ways. Include links so they can read more, and even suggest that students discuss these alternative approaches in the forum.

Obviously, it is up to you what you expect students to know ahead of time and how you design your course based on those expectations. Some people design for the least knowledgeable students; others for the most knowledgeable. Or, given the almost guaranteed diversity of your students, you may design for that average. No matter who you design for, consider the following things that can help different students:

Write clear, specific objectives.

Objectives accomplish two important things:

Objectives narrow down the information and keep it specific to the students' needs. For example:

In deciding the objectives for your course, try to design for the middle ground. Don’t make the primary objectives either too easy or too hard. If there is advanced material you think would be great for some of your students, design so that that information is optional. If there is background information that you think some students may need, again make it optional.

Decide what you want to assess in your assessments, both graded and ungraded.

Your assessments need to directly adddress your objectives, and your lessons need to directly address your assessments. In software development, this is known as assessment-driven development. The idea is to be very concrete about the outcome you want. “Students will know the answers to this set of questions.” You then create the lessons so that they enable that outcome.

Plan to assess everything that students need to learn, including activities that only mark progress and don't count for the grade. You and your students all need to know if they are learning effectively. You also need to know if your teaching approach is working. In fact, assessments serve multiple purposes:

  1. They let you rate students' progress.
  2. They let students rate their own progress.
  3. They suggest improvements to the course for future versions.
  4. They give grades.

Tips:

  1. Keep in mind that grading matters to students. Once you’ve said you will grade them, students want to know how the grading works and they will care passionately about getting a high grade. Once a deadline passes, you will hear from students who missed that deadline.
  2. Clearly identify which assessment activities count for the grade. Present other assessments as activities.
  3. Make your assessments compelling and challenging but not daunting or frustrating. You want to assess students’ progress, not to scare them away from the rest of the course.
  4. Make sure that the mechanics of doing the assessments does not interfere with the content of the assessments. You want to assess the content, not how facile a student is with opening browser windows or using different types of user interface.
  5. Assuming you want graded assessments, decide how those assessments affect the final grade.
    For example, assume you have two graded assessments, one in the middle of the course and one at the end of the course. If you count the first assessment as 35% of the final grade, the final assessment as 65% of the grade, and you require at least a 70% combined score to pass the course, then if a student misses the deadline for the mid-course assessment, that student cannot pass the course. Is that what you want? And are you ready for the reaction from students that that decision entails?
  6. You can only re-use assessments in later iterations of the course if you deliberately make them re-usuable. Once the course goes live for the first time, its content, including the assessments, is on the web. People will repost and share them. If you give the course again, many of the students may have already seen the assessments from the last time you taught the course.
    For example:
    1. If you use a set of randomized quiz questions, you should add substantially to the number of questions.
    2. A few tasks (such as essay topics) are open ended and allow students the creativity to create a new answer each time.
    3. Some practical tasks are completely re-usable.

Sequence and organize your content into digestible chunks.

Is there an overall flow to the material that makes logical sense? What dependencies are there in your content? Are there steps that students must learn before other steps? Are there concepts that they must understand? Even though you think your content has a logical flow from beginning to end, remember that people typically jump around online material. As much as possible, make each of your lessons standalone so that students can successfully access them in a different order than you anticipated.

Use a consistent lesson format and keep most most lessons approximately the same size so that your students know what to expect. For example,your lesson format might be: first define the topic of the lesson, then say why it's important, give a demonstration of the topic, talk about it a little, and finish with another demonstration and a short conclusion. For online consumption, your material should be in smaller chunks than for live classes. Keep videos 3-5 minutes in length.

The first lesson is extrememly important.

  1. Introduce yourself and get students start communicating. If they are new to each other, they might be quite reluctant, so you will need a good icebreaker.
  2. Start motivating students by engaging them. For example, answer the questions "Why is this course important?" "What kinds of problems is it trying to solve?"
  3. Clarify how the course will work. Tell students, for example:
    1. What the course is about and the rationale,
    2. textbooks and other resources,
    3. schedule of readings,
    4. scheduled activities, such as videoconferences,
    5. the hours that course staff will be monitoring the discussion forum,
    6. how they will be assessed, including deadlines, and
    7. "office hours," during which they can ask for help.

Some other things to consider during this step:

  1. Your videos can talk about fairly complex notions. If they do, be sure to back them up in other ways. For example, add tips before the activities and have multiple activities that point out the differences that cause the complexity.
  2. Because community is so important to an online course, consider putting hooks into your discussion forum from your lessons. For example, have students do an open activity and post the results to the forum, to discuss with other students.
  3. Design the primary objectives for your course for the "average" student. You may still want to have optional material available for students who require extra background material and for students who would like extra challenging material. Do not put this optional material in the course lessons. Instead, consider putting this material in other formats; see optional material.

A lot of your development time is spent in this step. For details on one way to create a detailed outline, see From Objectives to Outline.

Validate your content with others.

Once you’ve developed your content, it’s time to move on to implementing the course with technology.