If you’re looking to add variety to your e-learning courses, here’s a list of the types of content you should consider:
If you’re looking to add variety to your e-learning courses, here’s a list of the types of content you should consider: Slide Presentations: Slide decks are one of the most popular e-learning formats for good reason: you can easily add text, images, videos, animations, and graphs to a slide presentation to spice up the material.
When creating content online, ensure to put content in: 1. Text Try to give your students some notes to read even if it is simply a paragraph or a few lines. You can save it as PDF and upload it for them to download and read in their own time. 2. Image
A good online course often becomes a social learning environment and provides opportunities for the development of a vibrant learning community. A good online course is engaging and challenging. It invites students to participate, motivates them to contribute and captures their interest and attention.
An online course should be as short or long as it needs to be in order to deliver the learning outcomes it promises. In practice, you might create a course that only has a few short 5 minute videos to teach something simple. For a more in depth flagship course you might make 25-50 video lessons each 5-20 minutes long.
Be sure to include interactive lessons, group projects, hands-on labs, class discussions, and private chats that students can use to connect directly with their teacher. Here are some other elements that contribute to a highly-collaborative online learning environment: Video announcements, feedback, and tips.
Any informational material that is required for participation or understanding content such as assigned readings, video recordings, exams, and any other material needed for learning.
Structuring Your Online Courseorganize your course using the Modules tool.use the course Home Page and/or a "Getting Started with the Course" page to welcome and orient your students.write a readable, accessible syllabus that includes the information necessary for online students.
Four Steps to Create Course Content that FlowsConsider your goals in teaching this course. Decide what you would like your students to accomplish from taking this course. ... Develop topics and subtopics, then narrow down further. ... Structure the course with what you have finalized. ... Plan your content types.
In many ways, the structure of online courses closely resembles the structure of in-person courses. Each week, students generally must complete a set of required readings, watch one or more lectures, participate in a discussion with their classmates, and finish an assignment.
The number of lessons you choose to include in your online course mostly depends on the learning objectives you promise to deliver. Most short courses comprise of a couple of 5-minute videos while longer ones have 20 to 50 videos which are each around 5 to 20 minutes long.
Organizing content so it has a logical flow just makes sense. Using chapters, headings, and sub-headings to organize a resource allows students to clearly see how the main concepts are related. In addition, headings are one of the main ways that students using a screen reader navigate through a chapter.
A good online course is engaging and challenging. It invites students to participate, motivates them to contribute and captures their interest and attention. It capitalizes on the joy of learning and challenges students to enhance their skills, abilities and knowledge. A good online course is cognitively challenging.
A good online course requires a few things to make it worth the investment of time, effort, and money people are willing to invest in themselves an...
A course outline is a really important component of any prospective online course and it needs to fulfill a few different and important roles.An ou...
These are both very important but very different tools with quite distinct purposes, and they certainly shouldn’t be used interchangeably.The outli...
A course outline should contain several things. Ideally, it will include some basic information about the tutor such as name, contact information,...
A good online course is engaging and challenging. It invites students to participate, motivates them to contribute and captures their interest and attention. It capitalizes on the joy of learning and challenges students to enhance their skills, abilities and knowledge. A good online course is cognitively challenging.
It means audiovisual materials that don’t stereotype, shame or degrade people. It may mean that open educational resources are prioritized over expensive textbooks. A good online course is interactive. Courses are much more than placeholders for students to access information.
A good online course promotes student agency. It gives students autonomy to enable opportunities for relevant and meaningful learning. Such a course redistributes power - to the extent that is possible - in the classroom. Again, this may take many forms in the online classroom.
The problems with media comparison studies — that is, those that compare outcomes between one medium, such as face-to-face, to another medium, such as online — are such that many researchers advocate against them. How can students who enrol in online courses in the fall know they are receiving a good educational ...
In an accounting course, students could analyze the financial statements of a company they’re interested in rather than one selected by the instructor. Such flexibility not only accommodates students’ backgrounds and interests, it provides space for students to make the course their own.
In a creative writing class, students may write a short story, receive feedback, revise it and then write a different story. In a computer programming class, they may write a block of code, test it and then use it in a larger program that they wrote.
With very few exceptions, online teaching and learning will be the primary mode of education for the majority of higher education students in many jurisdictions this fall as concerns about COVID-19 extend into the new school year.
Through online tests and quizzes, an instructor is able to track the progress of students and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum, while at the same time students have the ability to track their own progress and improve on their skills accordingly.
As with any other website, application or product, compatibility is always a delicate matter. We need to always be sure that the material we post for learners to use is compatible with all the possible web browsers or platforms being used. To avoid discouraging learners, keeping it simple is preferable to overextending ourselves and possibly hitting an incompatibility roadblock.
A good online course requires a few things to make it worth the investment of time, effort, and money people are willing to invest in themselves and improving their skills. Ultimately, an online course needs to provide value to the student and this comes in a variety of forms.
Choose An Online Course Format. There are three main formats that you could use as a basis for your online course structure: 1) A step by step program. 2) A week by week program. 3) A reference course.
Structuring your online course content and making an online course outline is a vital step in creating an online course. It helps you focus on the most important content for your course, and creates a lot of clarity for when you come to the follow up step of actually recording and making it.
It is a collection of knowledge and information bundled neatly together and well organised, which people can refer to relevent sections of whenever they wish/need.
Ideally, it will include some basic information about the tutor such as name, contact information, and other relevant information.
The outline, as mentioned above, is intended to benefit students and tutors, setting expectations and garnering interest without giving too much away. It is intriguing and informative, but not an in-depth catalog of the course’s whole content package and what it offers.
A course outline is a really important component of any prospective online course and it needs to fulfill a few different and important roles. An outline, as its name suggests, needs to be brief, and give your students all the relevant information about what your course provides without any filler at all.
I create my course content by writing out the steps my students need to get the desired result. If your course caters to busy, working moms who struggle with getting more accomplished and your course promises they will be more productive, then you need to answer the question, “How can I be more productive as a busy mom with a career? ”
Now that you’ve written out the steps to get your students to their desired result, you need to decide how you’ll deliver the content. In my program, Master Your Market, my students get:
Bloggers, brands, and experts hire me to help them strategize, organize, and monetize their content so they can make an impact in the online space.
Using different content types can help minimize distractions and keep students engaged in the learning content. Those who might sleep or tune out while reading text will come alive and stay on course while watching a video or playing a game.
One of the biggest challenges of teaching online is distractions. Students get distracted in a face-to-face environment where the teacher is very much in control, it becomes even more difficult to keep that control in an online environment.
When using audio to teach, it should be a maximum of 10 mins and 10mb.
To make a virtual class more engaging, you can show your face so your students not only see your content but your face while explaining the content. Teachers should find or create relevant videos that can be used to teach and communicate content to #students—this increases student engagement.
A dull class can come alive just by changing the content type from text to audio and even more when changed to video!
Your students have access to content beyond you. They can learn from other experts in the field and this adds to their understanding of the concepts. Even though it takes some control out of your hands , it is very beneficial for students. Students can search for or build content based on the topic.
NB For audio and video, your content must be relevant and short and be sure to credit the source and creator.
Content can help you build the authority of your training. Content can encourage learners’ engagement. Content can add value to your training. So, let’s see how you can make your training content great. Imagine that you are in the following situation. You’ve already started working on your new eLearning course.
One of the main things you need to keep in mind while working on your eLearning course is the fact that your training targets adult people. Adults have different training needs and expectations compared to kids, so you need to get acquainted with the main principles of andragogy.
Make learners use what they’ve just learned. Include tasks and exercises that relate to the real-life.
Your learners are adults, and adults want to know why they need to take the training, what’s in it for them, how the training will ease their day-to-day job duties, etc. Make learners use their current knowledge. Include activities that will make them apply what they already know. Present the content.
Adults need to know that the training will have a direct and immediate impact on their daily job duties. The training needs to be problem-oriented. Your content has to focus on defined problems and how they can be solved. Adults prefer to learn through their experiences.
If the training plan includes a narrator , keep in mind that it is a good practice for the on-screen text and the narrator’s script to be different. If the training will include audio and video files, you are the one that will be responsible for their text development.
Adults prefer to have a say in the training development and assessment process .
According to a 10 year study conducted by the Online Learning Consortium, 6.7 million students have taken at least one online course and roughly thirty-two percent of all higher-education students now take at least one online course during their educational career. And these numbers continue to rise.
Plan for interaction! Make sure your course is rich in opportunities for students to engage with the content, with you and with each other. This means creating diverse activities like discussions, group work, case studies and collaborative problem-solving. Also, be sure to select resources that are relevant and present a variety of viewpoints and meet different learning styles. Consider multimedia, periodicals, web resources, etc.
Using the learning objectives you can become more selective in what you include in your course. This selection process is known as alignment. Alignment occurs when the course component (activity, assignment, material, technology and/or assessment) will help the student meet the learning objectives. To get started, build a Conceptual Framework for each module. In this framework outline the learning by identifying the course competencies and learning objectives for the module. Then review the course components (each piece of your module that you identified in the module map process) and see if they fit (align), i.e. contribute to the student achieving the stated learning objective. If a component does not align you need to either change the objective, change the course component or if it is essential to keep this non-aligned component, make sure that it is clearly identified as supplemental.
In Maricopa there are “course level” competencies that are designed and written by faculty at the district level through the Instructional Council for each discipline . Course competencies are what is required to be covered and taught in every course. For course design and mapping, especially online, a faculty member designs activities, assessments, lectures, etc. to teach those competencies….along the way students will learn incrementally – those are unit or module level learning objectives. These help students understand what they will be learning, how all the activities and assignments help them learn, and then in the end see where they have been.
We all love our course content! As a result, it is tempting to throw everything into your course in an effort to spark that same love in the heart of your students. But how do students know what is important and essential to their learning? How do we help them focus?
Online education is not an “alternative” to traditional classroom learning.
Able to support descriptions along a continuum: Each criterion can be described over a range of performance levels
Because of this, it is especially important that your content is organized consistently and with purpose. Divide the core subject matter into major units or modules and create further subdivisions that guide students through the content.
Many prefer online courses because of the convenience while others note challenges for interactive and engaged learning. Before you start designing your course, it’s important to recognize the differences that will make lesson plans originally designed for an in-person class an imperfect fit for your online class. By focusing on ease of use and emphasizing interactive activities, you can adapt those lesson plans more effectively or even design your own online lesson plan from scratch.
Understand your Learning Management System. A Learning Management System (LMS) is the software that you and your students will use to navigate the course. Each LMS has unique features and understanding their strengths and weaknesses will guide you in terms of what types of content you can or should use.
You’ll want to outline some rule of engagement in the syllabus to ensure that everyone on the message board is respectful and refrains from personal attacks. It may help to stay away from questions that involve particularly hot button political issues unless they’re directly related to the content.
Try to be consistent with the amount of information, the amount of time required, and the number of assignments for each module. This will help students adjust to the pace of the course early on and prevent confusion.
Determine learning objectives. Decide what you want students to get out of the course as a whole and out of each individual unit. These outcomes should be explicitly stated to the students and guide your development of the content. Start with objectives for individual units.
One of the most significant limitations of online learning is that students can’t interact with you or each other as directly. If you don’t include an interactive aspect of the course, the education students are receiving will be little better than if they simply bought a textbook and read it on their own.
An online course should be as short or long as it needs to be in order to deliver the learning outcomes it promises. In practice, you might create a course that only has a few short 5 minute videos to teach something simple. For a more in depth flagship course you might make 25-50 video lessons each 5-20 minutes long.
Another way to make your course interactive is to add activities between presentations. So one section of your course may have 5 minutes of video. Then students are instructed to pause and complete a worksheet before returning to watch the remaining 5 minutes of video.
You can have a longer overall course as long as you’re splitting it up into different sections , chapters, or modules (these all mean the same thing).
If you make your course too long, people will get bored and never actually finish it. But if it’s too short, people might not feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.
Each module might have 3 – 10 individual lessons within it which all hold together as a related subject or step in the learning of the bigger outcome. Each lesson of a module should be kept nice and short; just 5 – 20 minutes long. It’s best to create your courses with busy people in mind.
An starter course teaching people how to grow mushrooms at home: 10 lessons (1 hour, 22 mins)
Creating a good course structure is really important for the student experience and for helping you in your course creation, so for more detailed guidance check out this article about creating a course outline.