Building An Online Course - Part 1 - Planning
One of the things I enjoyed doing the most over the past several years was building online courses. I learned a lot from ones that never went anywhere, and had a few polished ones that I actually ran. I loved seeing the cool things that the participants created as responses to the assignments and the creative ways they adapted the materials. It was the most fun “grading” I’ve ever done.
The courses I had the most experience with were book studies, so I’m going to break down the process of how those were built in the next few posts.
The Thought Process Behind Book Studies
My team and I had taken some book studies before, and as participants coming from a maker mindset, we struggled to be engaged with generic questions to respond to for every chapter of a book.
When I started thinking about the sort of book study that could come from our program, I wanted something that leant itself to participants doing hands-on activities.
I also wanted to make sure they got the core ideas of a book, but didn’t necessarily respond to every chapter.
The book study would give additional support and clarification to the book, rather than being a reading check or just a discussion.
Where To Start
First, I had to pick a good book. The first EduProtocols book was my choice. It is wonderful because it is a great book, is a fun read, and has lots of lesson frameworks that participants can choose from to actually try hands-on.
Planning
When putting together an online course like this in something like Schoology, you want to have a rough framework figured out before you start building.
I started on paper by combing through the book and taking notes while re-reading it. I targeted main ideas to practice and sketched out some ideas for activities participants could do to work with the concepts or show their understanding.
For example, I created a book study for Bold School and found that to understand most of the examples given in the second half of the book, you needed a pretty solid understanding of how the Rigor/Relevance model works. I hadn’t heard of the model before, so the brief explanation in the book melted my brain while I was reading it. This meant I already knew the participants would likely need something to help them understand it too. During this early stage I determined that I would need something where the participants would see some kind of lesson and have to assess its rigor/relevance rating, but I didn’t quite know what it would look like yet.
Eventually, when I started building the course, the activity became watching a couple of short lesson videos and then placing a dot on a rigor/relevance grid to show what the level of each would be. Participants would then write a quick explanation of why they placed the dot as they had.
(If you now are wondering what the Rigor/Relevance model is, it is basically a chart with the Bloom’s taxonomy levels on one axis and how applicable something is to real life on the other. The combined ranking - that’s where the dot came in - is the quadrant where the two numbers overlap. See here for more: https://leadered.com/rigor-relevance-and-relationships-frameworks/)
Before my fingers even touch the keyboard, I have a rough outline of the folders and activities of the course. They progress in a manner that mimics a lesson plan so that the course itself has an intro and closure, and within each folder there is a progression from intro to closure. The course should also scaffold the concepts that the participants have learned.
For example, in my EduProtocols course, they progress through the EduProtocols folder by:
understanding what an EduProtocol is →
they practice two EduProtocols of their choice →
they reflect and share what they learned →
they design or adapt an EduProtocol to use in their class →
they plan how they’d use EduProtocols for four weeks or a unit.
At the rough sketch phase, I’ve also started to calculate how long each activity is likely to take. This editing process is important to make sure the course stays within a reasonable amount of time/credit hours. Some good ideas have had to be eliminated before even going digital… and more get cut as the course is being built and the activities actually get made. It is a constant weeding and tweaking process to get the timing right. (And the first time the course is run, it will probably still be a bit off.)
The first chunk of the course is also accounted for - the tutorial. Inspired by how video games gradually teach you the basics of how to play, and the idea behind EduProtocols’ “Smart Starts” to teach skills and build community, tutorials are content-free activities that make sure your participants can be successful in your course. I’ll talk about how I build tutorials and what those activities looked like in the next post in this series.