Teaching Online: Course Design for Online Success

Great online courses are built with intention, clarity, and accessibility in mind. This page provides tools and guidance to help you design engaging and equitable learning experiences.

Design Principles (ACEA)

• Alignment: Align content, assessments, and activities to the learning outcomes and course objectives.
• Comprehension: Improve comprehension by chunking content (breaking information into manageable pieces) to help students better absorb, process, and retain what they learn
• Engagement: Engage Students with intentional Regular and Substantive Interactions (RSI)
• Accessibility: Create accessible content using Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and ensure screen-reader compatibility.

Course Design Tools:

• Sample Syllabi
• Module templates (e.g., in Canvas Commons)
• Rubric Builder: Customize or adopt institutional grading rubrics
  • ASU Rubric Builder
  • Magic School Rubric Generator
• Learning Outcome Alignment
  • This link provides an overview of aligning outcomes, assessments, and instruction. Additionally, a beneficial feature provides examples for various disciplines in aligning a cognitive hierarchy (i.e., remember, understand, etc.) with sample learning outcomes, sample assessments or activities, and sample instructional strategies.
  • SMCC’s Learning Objectives and Outcomes page.
  • SMCC’s Backwards Design & Course Map
• Sample Course Design Checklist: Use this to self-audit your course before launch
• Accessibility: Captioning Support, other Accessibility Checker tools

Quick Tips for Strong Course Design

• Start with the end in mind
• Scaffold assignments to build toward major assessments
• Use multimedia thoughtfully (video, audio, infographics)

Learning Roadmap for New Online Instructors

Use this Faculty Forward Academy roadmap for a clearly structured set of videos and write-ups that will take you through the following items. It is not necessary to look at everything since each topic is a separate video. 

• Intro to Teaching Online
  • Overview of online teaching
  • Instructional design
• Planning and Designing Your Course
  • Course design
  • Student activities and assessments
• Developing Online Content
  • Creating content
• Setting up Your Course
  • Completing final course setup
• Facilitating Your Course
  • Preparing students
  • Interactions
  • Resources for interactions
  • Class Management
  • Feedback and grading