online course design

How We Cheat Online Students out of an Education

A number of online programs now have a “plain language” requirement for course content. This means that course content cannot use words that might be unknown to some students; institutions enforce the policy by keeping the content language at or below a designated education

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Thematic Course Design

Online courses are normally designed from an institutional template of common elements without reference to any particular subject matter. But this lack of context can get repetitive and boring. Faculty can instead design their courses with a theme that unifies the elements and pulls

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Formative Assessments for Online Learning

There are three types of assessments. A diagnostic assessment comes before learning, is ungraded, and measures prior knowledge of the upcoming learning material. It can be used to determine what needs to be taught. A summative assessment comes at the end of learning, is

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Using Design Thinking for Course Development

The term design thinking has cropped up in education journals and conference brochures more and more over the past few years, but its meaning remains a mystery to most instructors. The term comes from the business sector, where it refers to a process of learning

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Small-Block Online Course Design: What We Can Learn from MOOCs

The format of face-to-face education encourages “big-block” course design. Faculty are assigned one to three classes per week, each between 50 minutes and three hours long, and those become the atom units of planning. They devote most classes to delivering learning content as lectures and

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The Need for Pragmatic Expectations in Online Courses

As spring 2021 approaches, emergency remote teaching has perpetuated the need to offer online courses, without time to properly design and prepare for its implementation. While some faculty members were already teaching online or hybrid courses before the pandemic, for many others, their introduction to

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