eLearning Course Design

One of the main reasons for unsuccessful early elearning initiatives was poor e-learning course design, which failed to engage learners. When considering elearning course design at higher education, some of the key steps should be

Getting to know students
Getting to know employers’ needs
Articulating learning objectives
Designing course content and its presentation
Designing course interaction
Getting course feedback
Doing course evaluation

Getting to Know Students

Any elearning course design needs to draw on the knowledge about the students who will use it. Who are they? What is their background? What type of skills and knowledge they already have? What are their learning preferences? From market research and studies, identify the answers to these questions. This will assist you in selecting teaching styles, technology and learning paths, tailored to each individual student.

Getting to Know Employers’ Needs

In designing a new course, it is essential to research what are the knowledge, skills and attitudes that employers need. The information can be gathered from surveys with key employer companies. For example, if you are designing a course in programming, it is worthwhile to investigate programming needs of major software companies.

Learning Objectives

A learning objective is a clear statement of achievement at the end of the course session. It needs to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-framed. You can start writing a learning objective with a phrase “At the end of the course session the students should be able to …” Then add an active verb that describes what students should be able to do, in terms of knowledge, skills and attitudes, as per Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956).

Articulate 3-4 learning objectives for each university course.

Course Content – Design and Presentation

The content needs to meet the learning objectives, draw on learners’ previous experience, be relevant, up to date, engaging, challenging and fun. Beside the main body of content, the teaching material could include references for additional learning, glossaries, file attachments, FAQs, education simulation games and quizzes.

In selecting the content information a good starting point might be research and state-of-the art surveys of the course subject. The content should present a good balance between fundamental principles and applications.

To be an effective and active learning tool, an elearning module must go beyond a standard power point or pdf presentation. The empirical research on teaching and learning (Clark & Mayer, 2008) has come up with the recommendation to use multimedia in e-learning course design, as it is engaging, encreases retention of information and caters for multiple learning styles. Furthermore, following suggestions for effective elearning multimedia content presentation are provided.

Information should be packaged in short segments of 3-5 minutes.
Words and relevant graphics should be used together.
Related graphics and words should be placed next to each other.
On screen text should be replaced with narration to avoid visual overload.
When narrating text, the same onscreen text should be omitted.
Showing unrelated material, though interesting, needs to be avoided, as it interferes with learning.
Using conversational style and virtual coaches improves learning.

In this resource, you can find some principles of e-learning course design, with practical instructions on how to use the myUduty tool for designing your own course.

Course Interaction

The key to effective elearning is to engage the students through activities.

The activities should be matched to individual student background skills and knowledge. For example, if the student has little or no knowledge of the subject, an interactive quiz, focusing on content recall, might be appropriate, to reinforce learning by repetition.

For more advanced students, you can present a problem, set it in a real life scenario and ask them to come up with a solution. The best scenarios are provided by simulation games, which help students to think deeply about the subject, immerse it in a realistic context and make learning memorable.

It has been demonstrated that learning is improved through virtual teamwork. Activities should be designed to engage students in online collaboration projects with fellow learners, by using Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis.

Course Feedback

Feedback forms can range from personal responses through email, post or skype, shared comments in online forums and blogs to automated responses to student activities and assignments. In most cases feedback provides formative assessment, which helps students to track their performance. Assessment needs to encourage learning rather than to measure its outcomes.

Timeliness of feedback is important and it is helped by automation. Thoughtful feedback can make a difference between effective elearning and broadcasting content.

Course Evaluation

Course evaluation is done through student surveys. It should provide feedback on the student experience, course content, teaching activities and environment, to the teacher and the course development team. The findings should be used in the next course design iteration.

An Example of e-Learning Professional Development for Academic Staff

In this example of professional development for academic staff at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), various aspects of elearning course design are considered.