Planning Your Course for Online

Adapted from Stanford University through CC copyright license and NYU's FAS

The first thing to keep in mind as you prepare your course to be taught online is that you need to adapt  the content to align with the unique capabilities of the online modality and recommended best practices. This work will involve both pedagogical and practical considerations. Also keep in mind that this should be an iterative process; as you work with the affordances of this modality and observe their effects on student learning and engagement, you will want to refine and adjust your designs. 

As you navigate through the design process, your choices should be guided by this question:

  • What type of experiences do you want students to have while they are mastering course content through each learning activity, assignment, discussion, and assessment?

    • Interaction with each other (student-to-student)

    • Interaction with you (student-to-instructor)

    • Interaction with the content (student-to-content)

Best way to design your courses is by using a results-oriented backward design process. You will begin by articulating as specifically as possible what your students need to learn about the the week’s topic (see below the Learning Objectives), then collecting all of the materials they will need to use to do that learning (see below the Instructional Materials), and finally articulating the ways they will engage with those materials and demonstrate their learning (see below the Learning Exercises & Assignments).

For each week/module you should create a Weekly Lesson plan that  should provide the following:

  • Week #

  • Topic

  • Learning Objectives

  • Instructional Materials (Required & Supplemental)

  • Learning Exercises & Assignments

The following is a good checklist as you start to think about designing your course. This resource is useful for both in person and online courses. 

Steps

Learning Objectives

A statement of a learning objective contains a verb (an action) and an object (usually a noun).

The verb generally refers to [actions associated with] the intended cognitive process. The object generally describes the knowledge students are expected to acquire or construct.

Remember: these are learning objectives—not learning activities. It may be useful to think of preceding each objective with something like: “Students will be able to . . .”

The Cognitive Processes dimension — categories & cognitive processes and alternative names

Revised Blooms's Taxonomy in a Pyramid shape

Instructional Materials

Depending on your course’s learning format and your pedagogical preference and style, each of your weeks will take on their own unique shape. The following are examples to help guide your thinking about how they might look.

As you review these examples, please keep in mind that they are in no way meant to be prescriptive, but rather simply to provide you with a model of what each of these types of weeks can look like.

If you have a course where the focus of activities centers on Content Mastery, lecture may be a primary element to your course. For an online course that could be recording your lectures and offering them to your students asynchronously or having synchronous live zoom sessions. 

If you have a course where the focus of activities centers on  Skills/Process Focus, you are probably better off having minimal lecturing and focus more on readings that focus on skill acquisition explanations and allow your course activities/assignments to be guided discussions (that you actively participate in) and peer critiques.

If you have a course where the focus of activities centers on Experiential/Project-Based Learning then much of the work over semester might be focused around skills needed to do a large project. Most efficient way to do this is scaffolding — creating assignments that build toward a major goal — provides checkpoints and opportunities for feedback along the way during a project. It also allows you to focus the project on a particular aspect of the work for a short period of time, allowing students to master skills cumulatively. Scaffolded assignments are often lower-stakes individually, and may make a major project less intimidating. A simple example is a research project that requires students to turn in a topic, bibliography, outline, abstract, and final product spread over the course of six to eight weeks. Scaffolding is also common in labs that require increasingly complex skills, artistic productions, and projects that require students to collaborate on project management.

At this point you will want to move from the Syllabus to the Course Plan Template and use backward design to fill in the unit structure for your course. The question of “What is a unit?” and “What is a subunit?” may come up for those who don’t usually make this level of distinction in their courses. In this template, the Unit Overview section for each week is the place to put the higher level view of the week’s topic(s), the learning objectives associated with them, and any instructional materials that will be used. The Activity Overview portion of that section contains a general statement about how students will engage with the instructional materials over the course of the week.

The subunit sections are often where the real work of backward design comes into play. Here instructors have the opportunity to unpack the Activity Overview into the individual steps that students will need to take to reach the week’s learning goals. Separating the week’s activity out into clearly articulated subunits allows instructors to ensure they have been explicit in their assignments and expectations of student learning. Having a complete map of all of the expected steps in each week’s activities also gives instructors a way to ensure consistency in efforts and practices across the span of their course.

As you complete the units in the Course Plan template, you will move the student-facing information (assignments, materials, instructions) over to your Live Syllabus document and create any other supplemental planning documents you may need, such as question banks for quizzes.

In addition to the example weeks listed above, we’ve also compiled an assortment of different learning exercise/assignment, discussion, and assessment options for you to consider as you plan out your course.

Types of Online Learning Exercises & Assignments

Many of these resources below come from our colleagues at NYU's FAS.

Online Research

  • Description: Students are given a specific prompt or task that requires them to conduct research using NYU Library resources or on the open internet

  • Tools: Any web browser with internet access (NYU recommends Chrome or Safari)

  • Interaction: Student-to-instructor or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Asynchronous

Polling Exercises/Quizzes

  • Description: Students are presented poll-based exercises/quizzes that can be auto-graded. These exercises can be used as temperature checks, knowledge checks, or game-based competitions

  • Tools: Poll Everywhere, Zoom Polling

  • Interaction: Student-to-content, Student-to-student

  • Delivery: Synchronous or Asynchronous

  • Additional Resources: Comparison of Synchronous Engagement Tools

Knowledge Check

Social Annotation

  • Description: Enables conversations about texts or videos to take place in the texts or videos themselves; particularly effective for teaching close reading skills. Students can mark up assigned materials on their own, and instructors can “embed” question(s) for students to address while they complete their annotation. During the process, students can view and respond to the commentary from their peers and instructor.

  • Tools: Annoto (video), Perusall (text, video, or podcast), Google Docs (text), Google Jamboard (image)

  • Interaction: Student-to-student, student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Asynchronous or Synchronous (note: lends itself better for asynchronous delivery)

Student Video/Presentation Creation

Digital Poster/Flyer/Diagram Creation

  • Description: Students are directed to create some type of graphic or visual representation in order to demonstrate content mastery

  • Tools: Google Slides and/or PowerPoint

  • Interaction: Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Asynchronous

 

Online Discussions

Live Class Sessions

  • Description: Students and the instructor meet “in class” at a predetermined time for a set duration of time.

  • Tools: Zoom, Zoom Whiteboard, Google Jamboard, Zoom Polling, Poll Everywhere, Google Docs

  • Interaction: Student-to-student, Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Synchronous (can be recorded to be provided to students asynchronously)

  • Additional Resource: Sharing your Screen or Desktop in Zoom

Traditional Forum and/or Video Style Discussions

  • Description: Students respond to a prompt the instructor has provided via text and/or video response, in addition to respond to a number of their peers

  • Tools: Brightspace Discussions, NYU Stream, Flip, Google Chat

  • Interaction: Student-to-student, Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Asynchronous or Synchronous (Google Chat only)

  • Additional Resource:Comparison of Asynchronous Discussion Tools

 

Online Assessments

Essays/Papers

  • Description: Students write and submit work in accordance with instructor directions and specifications in order to demonstrate content mastery.

  • Tools: Brightspace Assignments, Google Docs, Google Assignments, Perusall (for peer review assignments)

  • Interaction: Student-to-instructor, student-to-content, or student-to-student (peer review only)

  • Delivery: Asynchronous

 

Individual/Group Projects

  • Description: Students individually or collaboratively work on a components associated with a project designed to enable students to achieve content mastery

  • Tools: Brightspace Assignments, NYU Stream, Google Slides

  • Interaction: Student-to-student, Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Asynchronous or Synchronous

 

Exams

  • Description: Students complete and submit multiple choice / true-false / matching / short answer / essay questions to demonstrate content mastery.

  • Tools: Brightspace Quizzes, GradeScope, Google Forms, Respondus

  • Interaction: Student-to-instructor, or student-to-content

  • Delivery: Asynchronous or Synchronous

 

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