Special - Design Tips for Online Courses

T4LT Design Tips for Online Classes
1. Reduce the number of clicks needed to get to your materials. If you only have one item in a folder, move it up a level and remove the folder.

2. De-clutter your pages. If you are not going to use tools, get them out of your students' way.

3. Keep students on track with due dates. Setting Milestone dates in ANGEL adds assigned and due dates to your course calendar.

4. Include a Start Here! module or activity, some ideas include Ice-Breaker Forum, Course Tour, Discipline Pre-test, or Syllabus Quiz.

5. PowerPoint is a nice presentation tool, but without a presenter, it falls way short. Consider narrating your slides, replacing with short videos, converting to study guides, or expanding into stories for discussion.

6. Speaking of video, YouTube and other sites can be mined for just about any topic. Or consider creating your own welcome video to greet your students.

7. Include crystal clear measurable course objectives with each activity and assessment - avoid unnecessary jargon. Assist your students in understanding how each activity helps them achieve the outcomes of the course.

8. Simplify your grading policy. Not every student is going to be a math major. Rather than having one quiz worth 8 and the next worth 16, make them all 10.

9. Keep students coming back to your course - post announcements, new videos, discussions, timely news articles, virtual office hours. If you don't go to your course, your students won't likely go either.

10. Give more personalized feedback in bite sized morsels. A quick thought on a submission can be just the encouragement your student needs.

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