Now that you've thought through the goals for your course, you can begin to get specific. Let's look at presenting your content first.

If you are like most instructors, you are accustomed to deciding what content is important to cover in your class, building lecture notes to cover that content (usually in PowerPoint or Keynote), then delivering that content by showing those slides and speaking in front of your students while they listen intently, take notes, and ask pertinent and thoughtful questions.

Sadly, he quickest path to a dreary online course is taking those lecture slides and creating some sort of 50-minute video version of them. "Chunking" that video into five 10-minute videos isn't much better. In order to create clear, interesting content delivery we recommend working backward: decide what should students be holding at the end of the content presentation. Decide what you DON'T have to lecture on, but can provide with existing content. Lastly, decide what DOES require a short content video.

Example: Introduction to Public Health

Let's imagine a course in public health. For Chapter 16 on obesity, the instructor is accustomed to giving a 50-minute lecture on epidemiology, the research on effective diet and exercise, and the history of public health promotions on this topic. She knows precisely what facts and graphs from the book to include in her slides, and she tries to show a recent public health commercial promoting diet or exercise each year.

Now she is teaching online. There is no 50 minutes that needs to be filled by her presentation, so she starts at the end - what would student lecture notes look like once they have seen this material? She creates an outline of main points for her students in a new document. Once she has an outline, she takes these steps:

What part of the "lecture notes" can be filled in by reading the required textbook? She adds the appropriate sections to be read and the questions students should be able to answer to the student outline.
What part of the "lecture notes" can be filled in by assigning a pre-existing video from YouTube or another source? The link to the video is added to the course, and the questions students should be able to answer are added to the student outline.
What new content is available because all students are online? The instructor has a new resource in this online class - she can send her students to find and record the most recent data on obesity by state. They record their answers on the student outline.
What part of the outline is left? Once the instructor has organized all of her existing content, she realizes there is very little she needs to add in the way of a "lecture." She has one great case study she likes to describe in class, so she makes a short video of herself describing that case study, and adds questions to the student outline so students know what to remember after watching the video.

This instructor is done with content delivery for this topic. The material has been organized, and students know exactly what they need to record and study for future activities and exams.

What about your course?

After reading through this example, how will you deliver your content for the course? Do you have a good text, and merely need to create an effective reading guide? Or is your course based on a more unique content organization? If so, you will need to create the readings and video that will help students understand the content and be able to study it effectively for exams.

Some take-home messages are:

Generate a student notetaking outline first - to help you decide what needs to be taught
Write specific questions for students to answer from the reading, don't just say "Read chapter 16."
What resources are already online for you to use? A sprinkling of external resources with clear questions in the student outline will keep your class fresh and interesting
What topics in the outline would really benefit from your explanations? These are the sections to capture using your own writing or video.
Create video that requires student notetaking. Another benefit to online courses is that students can re-watch or change the speed of video. You can be brisk and still require attention and notetaking.

If you are completing the Certificate, you will be asked to choose a lecture from the course you are working on, and create a student outline with the source of the content marked for each topic.