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Planning for your Course

A great amount of planning should occur before you ever begin to upload content into Blackboard. Your tendency will be to jump immediately into placing content into your course shell, but spending some time locating and planning your course will save you time when you are actually placing content into your course.

Step 1: Create a Course Outline.

In face-to-face courses, assignments are presented to students to coordinate with assigned readings and lectures. The instructor typically addresses questions about the assignments in the classroom. In a distance course, one organizational method found to be useful is to create an outline or table containing class sessions, assigned readings, assignments, assessments, projects, and other pertinent points for instruction.

Example (by Week).

Your course doesn’t have to be organized by weeks. You may also consider using topics, chapters in the text, or other organizational schemes. Regardless, this schedule of planned activities will help you organize your materials, assignments, and assessments.You may note that this organizational outline looks remarkably like the Course Content and Class Schedule often found in syllabi. We often organize face-to-face instruction by dates (classroom meetings), but distance coursework allows you to expand this organizational scheme to make it fit your content and your style.

Modules.

F2F courses use a predetermined schedule to meet. One of the advantages of distance courses is that students can work within the course at their pace and at times that are convenient. That's great for the students, but what about the instructor? We favor organizing your course into "chunks" of information called modules. Our rationale is that the generic title (Module) allows you to reorganize your course for short summer sessions without modifying the titles on your menu or in your sections of the course. We suggest five modules with three units per module or eight modules with two units per module as a starting point. This allows you to cover one unit per week during a regular semester and to use the same overall organizational scheme to move the course to a short semester.

Step 2: Paper and Pencil Prototyping.

Before you even look at the CMS, sketch out the major sections of your course and supporting folders for each section. We suggest you take a piece of paper and draw out the course. Put in a section for the menu and organize the menu into the items you feel should be included. You will need some general section(s) to describe your expectations and procedures for the course. You will also need some content sections (modules). The more time you spend prototyping your course, the easier the course will be to build.

When you first view your course shell, the first thing you need to think about is the Course Menu found on the left hand side of the course site. You have a great amount of control over this menu. ID wants to help you control Blackboard rather than having Blackboard control you. We can provide numerous suggestions of ways to use Blackboard more efficiently for teaching and learning. Work to structure a menu that meets your needs and presents your course in the manner you envision. You can modify titles, text or button options, colors, etc.

Take another sheet of paper and plan your modules. Organize the exact order that you want materials and assignments and everything else you want in each module. Your instructional designer can show you how to copy one module to other locations in order to minimize the amount of work on your part. 

Step 3: Create a Standardized Guide.

Create a guide for students to each module in your course. We suggest you include learning goals and/or outcomes, important dates, required readings, learning activities, discussion boards, and graded assignments/ assessments. The advantage of placing all material in a single format is that these guides can be refreshed each semester without entering your course and searching through your content. We use PDF copies of the guides and keep the originals on our desktop computer. This means we can refresh a course while offline and then load the changes into the course shell when it is available.

Idea modified from Smith, R. (2008). Conquering the content: A step-by-step guide to online course design. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Module Guides.

We also suggest you place all material that you know will need to be modified as you move across different semester into a separate document. We use the title "Module Guide" for ours but you can use any title you like. The idea is keep all information that you will need to update in one location. This keeps you from searching through your entire course each semester. We also suggest you house these files on your computer. You can then update your course dates and schedules as soon as the upcoming semester calendar becomes available. You no longer need to wait for your course shells to begin to update your course.

Step 4: Modify Existing Materials and Activities.

We know that you have spent hours getting your F2F materials just right. Unfortunately, most of these materials will need to be modified in some way for the distance course. Putting a PowerPoint into your course may not provide the same information as having you talk about the PP in the F2F. Think how you can provide the same information in some manner. You can modify the content, the learning activities, the discussion activities, etc. to ensure that students are receiving a similar level of content.

Most materials used in face-to-face courses can be modified for use in a distance course, but there are some techniques that will make this process a bit easier. One of the things we urge you to do is to contact TWU Instructional Designers to help you modify materials for the online environment. You should verify that materials are readily available electronically. Did you know that many of the journal articles that you would like students to read can be embedded within your course? Contact Distance Learning Library Services for assistance. Did you realize that Interlibrary Loan is a thing of the past for many documents? Librarians can help you get the proper resources and help format them for student use.

Step 5: Begin to Understand the Structure of Blackboard.

Once you have a menu that you like, you are ready to put in organizational elements to hold content and other information. We suggest you add folders to some of your main menu items to create a secondary organizational scheme. Creating folders based on your outline and paper prototype is easy to do since you know know where you want to place the bulk of your material. Create folders based on your organizational plan.

Step 6: Create Folders in your Course.

One trick that we use is to completely finish the folders for one module and then copy that module to other locations representing the same organizational scheme. We like this method because it creates consistent schemes in each section. This only works for areas where you want a lot of duplication (like from module to module). 

Step 7: Upload Content and Learning Activities.

Suggested Ideas for Distance Education Course Design.pdf

 Adapted from a document created by Robin Bartoletti for University of North Texas Center for Distributed Learning, 2004.

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