Organize Your Course for Success

Imagine this: You visit your local market to pick up some peanut butter, but it’s no longer where you expect it. You ask for help, but still can’t find it. You give up and leave the store with no peanut butter. A disorganized online course is like the rearranged market. When students log in and can’t easily find what they need to complete a task or lesson, their frustration often leads to giving up.

An organized course creates a pattern of expectations, resulting in routines that are easy for students to follow. Instructional designers often refer to these routines and patterns as the “learning cycle.” A clear learning cycle allows students to anticipate their learning and plan ahead. A consistent course structure and communication pattern will lower students’ anxiety and keep them focused on learning.

The “three Cs” of good course organization are:

• Clarity
• Consistency
• Communication

In a face-to-face course, you can go over the syllabus to answer questions and verbally roadmap the course. In a digital environment, roadmapping must be explicit in the course design and instructional copy. When a student spends time looking for instructions, content, due dates, etc., their anxiety level increases and becomes a cognitive burden. Good organization reduces that burden.

The goal is to make it easy for students to know:

• Expected learning outcomes
• What tasks are required each day/week and how to find and complete them
• When and how they’ll interact with you
• When and how they’ll interact with other students
• What they’ll be graded on and how to prepare for assessments

The most common way to provide this organization is with weekly modules that group course materials and present them in chronological sequence. A module should have links to everything needed for each lesson. Coursework that’s one click away lets students focus on learning rather than finding materials.

It’s extremely helpful if your department or program agrees on some conventions for how to organize courses, so don’t hesitate to consult with your colleagues.

Even in the best circumstances, students have busy lives. Many need to schedule their Internet access in advance; almost all will need to schedule their studies around work and/or childcare. This means students quickly look for coursework deadlines. Among the most helpful things you can do is establish a regular pattern of study and activity completion, so students can create a schedule at the beginning of the term.

For example, a common pattern for courses with one synchronous session per week is to have all homework due the day before the live session. Within a department these days can be staggered for all required courses.

Coursework patterns can also support a constructivist learning cycle. These follow a basic pattern (with variations):

Activation: Connect each topic to something students already know, then get them curious about aspects of it they don’t know.

Demonstration: Show students why/how this topic is relevant in the world.

Application: Let students practice using each concept or skill, with feedback.

Integration: Help students remember this lesson by reflecting on and discussing it.

This pattern has many variations, depending whether learning outcomes are more experiential, inquiry-based, or modeled on apprenticeship to demonstrate, coach, and support independent skill-building.

A good rule of thumb is that people can pay attention for 20 to 30 minutes before they need to process and connect with the new information. Active learning can take many forms. Students need to process new ideas and skills by practicing them, not just absorbing them. A handy constructivist motto to remember: “Telling isn’t teaching, and listening isn’t learning.”

For every major skill in your pyramid, think about how students can practice that skill fairly soon after it’s introduced. For information retention, give a brief review quiz. For critical thinking or skill performance, ask students how they would choose among different approaches to solving a problem. For a creative process, have students make a low-stakes artifact and share it. This does not mean overloading students with challenging assignments — these should be fun, low-stakes activities.

Once you’ve defined your key learning outcome and “chunked” them into 20 to 30 minute lessons with a low-stakes activity for each, the next step is to put them in a logical sequence. Beware the temptation to follow textbook-chapter sequencing. Books are organized by the logical flow of domain knowledge, not the order in which students learn intellectual skill-building. Instead, focus on your learning outcomes and what students need to practice for each outcome.

1. Look at your list of learning outcomes. Now imagine a pyramid with those outcomes at the top and decide what skills students will need to attain them (conceptual, procedural, behavioral, affective or physical skills).
2. List those skills at the base of the pyramid and consider whether they should be learned in a particular order. Decide the best way for students to:
   • Observe this skill demonstrated.
   • Practice and refine this skill with feedback.
   • Self-correct and improve this skill independently.
3. Think of all the possible modes students could work in to gain each skill. If you normally assign multiple essays or exams, consider other ways students might demonstrate needed skills.

Research shows that without regular mini-challenges, students don’t learn as well. They need to use each “chunk” of new knowledge/skill to remember it and be able to apply it.
But there’s a problem with this “think and do” learning pattern: Even low-stakes assignments can intimidate, overwhelm, or annoy students. How do you make this pattern transcend “busywork” and become meaningful?

The best way is to let students choose their own “think and do” activity:

• Students with writing or homework anxiety often benefit from review quizzes with multiple attempts allowed. Such quizzes are learning tools, not assessment tools.
• Students with quiz anxiety often prefer to create a mini-artifact or write a discussion/journal post to activate their learning. You can assess these on a done/not done basis or with a simple rubric.

Ideally, your course content will have options for content delivery. This can be as simple as making sure students know their computer operating system offers text-to-voice delivery for PDF content. When possible, provide accessible audiovisual options for articles, so students can choose to get information in the way that works best for them.