Organizing an Online Course

Organization is Key

While developing an online course, one of the most important things that an instructor can do is to provide organization for the materials within the course. Icons, such as three below developed by an instructional designer on the Distance Education Team, can provide reference points to organization in an online course. Strong organization will allow students to navigate the course easily and to understand fully the learning environment of the course. I work with instructors to consider their online class in CarmenCanvas as their physical classroom space: if their students did not understand the organization of the classroom, would they be successful in the course?

I help course instructors to decide how best to organize their course information not only create a positive, coherent learning environment for their students, but to, ultimately, maximize student success. By viewing the course from a student perspective, I am able to help faculty identify areas for improvement with respect to the overall organization of their course.

On this page, you can view a few different approaches that I have used in course design to make course organization transparent to students.

 

  

 

PLANNING THE COURSE JOURNEY

In the infographic below, you will see the graphical representation of the course journey for PHR 7584: Applied Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics. This allowed me to visualize the way in which the students would experience the course and informed design decisions for the course. In PHR 7584, students start with foundational materials about compounds that make up drugs. Next, students examine pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic assays that allow for drugs to be created and preclinical drug trials. Finally, the course ends with the testing of newly created drugs in clinical trials.

While this infographic does not appear in the course, it ultimately allowed me to understand the journey which Dr. Mitch Phelps, the course instructor, envisioned for his students. Courses can be organized in a multitude of ways from chronological to simple to complex to theory to applications. By working with an instructor to identify the course organizational theme, I was able to structure the course in a meaningful way by reflecting the “journey” a chemical compound takes to become a drug ready for clinical trials.

An infographic demonstrating the course journey in PHR 7584.

MODULE SET-UP

The ODEE Distance Education team already has designed an easy-to-use template into which you can populate course content. I have implemented a simple organizational scheme that allows students to truly understand the learning environment of the online course.

ORGANIZATIONAL INFOGRAPHIC

Overview

Infographics can demonstrate key concepts or to map out the learning progressions in courses for students. Student resources like the one below allow students to understand fully the curricular design of the course as students often want to know the “why” behind a given instructional choice.

Student-Facing Introduction on Carmen Page

Below, you can view an infographic displaying how you can use information learned from this course to identify toxicological responses of the cardiovascular system to caffeine.

During Module 1, you will learn about the framework by which we will study the remaining organ systems. You will first engage with a robust module on Human Health Risk Assessment.

For each subsequent module, you will learn:

  1. Some brief physiology of a given system,
  2. Toxicological responses of that system to a known toxicant,
  3. Known toxicants to the system, and
  4. How these toxicants are assessed and mitigated through risk assessment.

View the infographic below to see how information in this course could allow you to evaluate any known toxicant’s effects on a given organ system. For this example, we have shown the cardiovascular system and a known toxicant—coffee.

FINAL PROJECT RESOURCES

Suppose a course has a large portfolio assignment. As an instructional designer, not only can I help faculty to design the assignment, but I can also develop a resource module for the course so that students have all the materials needed to complete the assignment in one place.

Below, you will see an example of a resource module I developed for the blog assignment from the course PHARM 7588: Toxic Substances. I added all of the sign-up sheets, assignment prompts, peer review assignment prompts, and blog creation resources to the module. Because the course modules unlock a week at time, students can still view all of the upcoming major assignments through this Blog Project Resources Module, which is open throughout the duration of the course.

COURSE REFERENCE READINGS REVISION

To highlight the importance of course organization efforts, you can view the changes I implemented in HTHRHSC 4530: Nutrition for Fitness. The instructor identified important readings that outline professional guidelines for sports nutrition from various organizations. I worked in concert with the instructor and the DE copyright librarian to find permalinks through the OSU Libraries in order to get permanent access to these vital readings for the students and to address copyright considerations appropriately. In addition, we re-organized the readings such that now students receive a brief overview of the significance of the readings and can view the groups of readings by professional organization.

  • NOTE: This is an “interactive presentation” content type for H5P. To proceed through this presentation, use the right and left arrow icons within the window to view the content. Make sure to hover your cursor over each slide to view the associated text with each slide.