Wiki Page, GOTT Clover II: Designing for an Online Course

Wiki Page
2016-08-14T21:32:33-06:00

When teaching in a traditional classroom, you may use Canvas simply to administer quizzes, assignments or forums. Often, you can leave content "gaps" in your Canvas course, since you can easily fill in those gaps as you teach in the classroom. However, in an online course, you'll need to flesh out your Canvas course more fully, by providing background information and context that you would normally provide in a face-to-face classroom. An online course should be more than just a series of assignments.

One of the most important things to remember when designing for an online course is online course delivery is, by its very nature, different from face-to-face teaching in a classroom. The medium itself is different, with its own inherent weaknesses and strengths. It's important to design your courses so you utilize the strengths of online learning.

It's easiest to explain with a few scenarios:

Scenario One:

In the first scenario, a teacher presents a PowerPoint presentation in class. The last slide of the presentation contains a thought question the students then discuss in class.

How do we best teach this content in an online course?

We could simply upload the PowerPoint file to a module in Canvas, and expect the student to browse through the slides. However, if we do this, students will not see any presenter notes unless we explicitly ask them to download the file and open it in PowerPoint.

PowerPoint presentation files are really not well-suited for online courses.

Instead, the teacher could create a brief video recording of the presentation using Camtasia software, and then embed the video in the course. The teacher could remove the last slide of the presentation that contains the thought question, and could instead create a discussion forum in Canvas, where students are asked to discuss the question together.

In a few simple steps, the teacher took a file not well-suited to online learning and created something much more interactive and engaging.

Scenario Two:

A teacher hands out a printed Word document in class that explains all the different jobs available to engineers. The teacher asks the students to read the handout and answer some questions on a separate worksheet.

In Canvas, a teacher could simply upload the Word files and add them to a module. The student would then read the file in Canvas, download the worksheet and upload it when the worksheet is complete.

How can we make this activity more effective and utilize the strengths of an online course format?

One way we could strengthen this activity is to copy the text from the handout and paste it into canvas pages. Consider chunking the content, so that only a paragraph or two are on each page. This prevents unnecessary scrolling. Consider searching the Internet for associated images or videos and embedding them on each page with the text.

Then, rather than requiring students to read a long Word file added to your course, you present content pages for them to click through, each with associated images, videos, links to other sites, etc.

You could then create an interactive quiz or survey in Canvas, where students could answer the questions online and in a more interactive fashion, than filling out a downloaded worksheet.

Scenario Three:

A teacher has found two videos on YouTube that relate to that week’s topic, and has decided to add them directly to a Module in Canvas.

The students will then click the link and view each video, without much background information or explanation as to why the clips are included in the course.

Instead, the teacher could create a content page or two in Canvas, and embed the YouTube videos in the page, along with background information and an explanation of why the videos are important. The teacher might even want to include a thought question or two for the students to think about while they watch the videos.

The teacher could also create a simple multiple choice quiz in Canvas, with questions relating to one of the videos. The teacher could then embed the video in the instructions for the quiz. When viewing that quiz, students would then see the video, with the questions appearing beneath it. This is a good way to ensure video viewing is not a passive activity.