Is your online course organized and easy to follow? Here are top tips to maximize your course design.
Hi, I’m Chase DiMarco and in this module, we will cover the structuring and planning your course design and features list. Creating content is an important step in your course. But if it’s difficult for your learners to navigate, it can impact what they take away from your hard work. Plus being organized will help you speed up the creation process and prevent procrastination as with any large project outlining is a crucial first step. This not only helps to organize the flow of your course but allows to break it down into multiple segments or modules.
Bite sized categories are not only easier for your learners to follow, but give you the ability to create material one module at a time. This can be done easily with a spreadsheet or notepad for most courses. But if your material is very complicated, consider using a white board or the use of story boarding methods to allow quick edits to be made.
You might also want to consider taking notes of creative media that you might want to use to emphasize a particular topic in that module, we’ll come back to this in a few moments.
Traditionally classrooms follow a lecture-based framework. This means that a lecturer sits at the front of the class and talks at learners, it’s then their responsibility to receive this information usually after one mention and that’s about all the instruction they will receive.
This is considered teacher-based learning and it doesn’t take into consideration the vast differences and speeds that learners may absorb different concepts, procedures or facts. Although self-directed learning is a crucial skill set for all learners to develop especially in healthcare and higher education courses, we can still do a lot to increase our learners chances for academic success.
Student based learning focuses on students’ needs abilities and giving multiple tools to learn the same concept. Although mark theories of student preferences have been thoroughly debunked. This doesn’t mean that we can’t use these to teach our material in a multitude of different learning modalities.
After you’ve created your topic and module outline for the planned course, consider revisiting the material with these points in mind.
▪ How can we adapt to the cognitive psychology of learning for our students?
▪ What tools might provide an increase in success for all of our learners and
▪ How can we spice up the material a little bit?
Having an outline and a few ideas for connecting our materials to our learners is an important early step and we can continue to add to our course design over time for those creating clinically based courses, matching your material to the appropriate competencies for your student type or specialty is a small extra step that can make a huge difference. If you have ever taken a course in statistics recall that not only is the reliability of a test or an experiment important but the validity as well.
Clinical competencies help assure that your material is valid and appropriate for your course design, for medical students.
This currently falls under the A. C. G. M. E.
Six core competencies this guides graduate medical education for medical residents. But whatever your profession or specialty search for the correct competencies and try to incorporate them into your outline. Give examples when appropriate to help explain when these competencies apply and how to apply them.
Next let’s discuss the tools that you might use to increase learner enjoyment and retention of the material. Let’s take a quick look at some features that you can utilize or your course to make it unique and engaging for your learners.
Although the traditional student lugging around a backpack with 40lbs of textbooks has gone the way of the eight track or cassette tape providing text-based resources is still invaluable for many students and a great way to focus your content.
Many students, despite their preference for other forms of media, still learn best by reading from a trustworthy source and at their own pace. And giving multiple recommit reading resources allows for learners in all demographics to participate in your course. Besides purchasing expensive text books you can recommend book rental sites free online resources or even simply checking out your local university or public library.
Many learners also enjoy the use of audio media for their studies especially for those of us with learning disabilities and it also helps to give them the option to study on the go. But in general, this is a supplemental resource and shouldn’t be the main focus for your course content. A great utilization of audio media is simply to link relevant podcast episodes into the appropriate module. This content is already curated for an audio-based audience and produced for higher audio quality. After all, no one likes listening to complicated medical material that sounds like it was recorded on an at home karaoke, adding video, graphics, text or sound effects is a great way to spice up the material to and it’s easier than ever to record your material at home in a multitude of different ways.
Now that you have your topic broken down into an outline and a general course pedagogy selected. It’s time to plan out how you wish to portray your video-based content. Using presentation software allows students to follow along with the topic while also allowing you to add extra visual aids to increase their attention. It might be a bit frightening at first, but it’s highly recommended that you record your webcam or other camera view, seeing the instructor instead of only hearing their voice, can really add credibility to your course and gives the learners more of a personal touch.
We plan to revisit this in much greater detail in a future advanced course. If you’re preparing an online class, the chances are you plan to use most of these materials and present them in a prerecorded or asynchronous manner. This is fine for most topics but others can benefit from also adding in synchronize learning, whether this is using Zoom, Google Hangouts or more classroom specific modalities, hosting at least the occasional live session is a great way for learners to connect with you and your material even more. Med University has several interactive tools that you may wish to explore. So, contact us for more details.
Assessment of learner’s advancement is a staple in both traditional and modern education systems. However, exactly how to assess the growth is not always easy to determine.
Quizzes are one method that we’re probably all familiar with and there are diagnostic assessments, formative assessments, summit of assessments and also some informal assessments which are better used in sporadic and interactive or synchronous course settings. There are strengths and weaknesses to each type of assessment. So, planning out the appropriate type for your material and educational setting ahead of time can really help for learners to receive feedback about their potential weaknesses. It also gives instructors some notes of where confusing points in their class might be to make edits for future sessions, but for greater attention learners might also be guided to more self-directed assessment tools. Space repetition is a strong evidence-based learning technique when applied properly, but most of us were never taught how to use flashcards in an effective manner. How to set them up what to put on each side, how to focus on the areas we’re having the most trouble with and that’s where space repetition for flashcards really shines. Luckily, we have software that can do this for us now.
Programs like Anki and Brainscape allow for quick creation and advanced features for our flashcards, we can add images and sounds and use fill in the blank answers and these learning styles for students to recall information instead of attempting to recognize an answer from a multiple-choice list, retrieval of information is far superior to recognition based memories.
Check out some of the supplemental resources for this module for more information.
If you’re considering creating a course on your own or through one of the learning platforms mentioned in module one, there are a few important things that you should think about before. As far as the functions and features that you have available.
Will you have to pay extra for quiz functionality?
Do you have a limit on the number of students or courses you can have, will you be responsible for purchasing extra third-party software maybe?
And what is this going to do for the overall cost of your course?
These add to the overhead and take a lot of extra planning for a successful course launch, but through MedEd University we don’t have these limitations on you and your courses.
You also have access to many of our 3rd party programs from the platform resources. This means that there’s more independence, more flexibility and power while also keeping your costs down. If you haven’t already contact us to see how you can host your course on MEU. You consider the learning curve for each tool, how to integrate these tools and how to increase learner engagement. If your learner is not focused on your material, then passive learning styles will take over and decrease the overall impact of your course.
Take some time to brainstorm which teaching methods you find interesting and which bits of feedback you’ve received on past courses you’ve created, taking some time to plan now can save countless hours on your course creation journey later.
So, join me in the next module and we’ll continue on with tips for making your material more enticing for your learners.