Gathering, Making, and Structuring Content
As you design your course based on your desired learning outcomes, it is important to think through what parts of your content are critical to support student achievement of those outcomes and what parts are less critical. By continuing the process of backward design, the foundational content should directly support students as they complete activities and assessments. Content that doesn't directly support activities and assessments (which were developed to provide practice and show mastery of learning outcomes) is supplemental content and would be prioritized behind foundational content. Supplemental content can include additional in-depth materials for advanced students, related inter-disciplinary content, or review of basic knowledge and skills for students without the prerequisite abilities for the course.
Focusing on Content
One of the keys to supporting student learning is to carefully define the scope of each module, unit, or learning event. You will often have more content than can or should be included given the desired outcomes and the amount of time available. To keep the scope of the content manageable, it helps to clearly describe the prerequisite knowledge students need.
By returning to the question “What do the learners need to do?” and the related question of “Is this content necessary for the learners to be able to do what they need to do?” you can avoid information overload.
Avoiding information overload can be difficult, especially in an online environment where it’s often easy to keep adding resources through links to other websites or documents. You may hear instructional designers talk about “chunking” content, a term from cognitive information processing which emphasizes that the average human being can hold only so much information in short-term memory before it either “falls out” or gets pushed into long-term memory. Chunked instruction is designed to limit the amount of information presented at any given time to an amount that learners can handle in short-term memory, process, and integrate into long-term memory. A good chunk is something that can be understood as a whole; it should be able to stand alone but also link to other chunks. This paragraph is a good example of a chunk.
Producing Your Own Content
Audio and Video
While it may be tempting to simply record yourself lecturing for an hour and post the videos for your online class, research shows that this is not an effective strategy. Traditional-aged students do tend to engage with video more than adult students; however, studies show that shorter video is the key to getting any students to watch. One study found that <6 minutes is optimum for student engagement. The average YouTube video is around 4 minutes, and analytics show that viewing still drops off significantly around halfway through on these short segments. Even TED Talks tend to stay under 15 minutes. While there is no definitive research showing increased learning from shorter videos, if the students don't watch the video, they can't learn from it. While you may be convinced that your students are different, it is a good idea to start out with a solid mix of content types and review the analytics from your videos before deciding to go all in. Plus, it is easier to re-record a short video than a long one when you need to update content. Making Your Own Videos in the Multimedia Module goes into more detail if you are interested in recording your own video.
Many faculty have PowerPoint presentations that guide students through a review of the key points in the written material. If you are considering taking those PowerPoint files as they are and recording audio over them, there are a few caveats regarding this strategy for online classes. If you are using audio presentations with slides, please review the Guidelines and Best Practices for using PowerPoint in Online Classes (pdf, 1.62MB). Download Guidelines and Best Practices for using PowerPoint in Online Classes (pdf, 1.62MB). Presentations and Interactive Media in the Multimedia Module provides more information and sampling of tools you can use to create regular and interactive presentations.
Though podcasts have waned in popularity over the past years, some faculty prefer to talk to their students through audio only in a podcast/audio book style. If your video or presentation has no important visual elements, an audio-only version can be a good option, especially for students who prefer to listen while they commute, exercise, or other activities that don't allow for full visual attention. You don't need to create the next Stuff You Should Know Links to an external site. or RadioLab Links to an external site. to be successful but scripting and eliminating audio distractions such as umms and uhhs, unconscious tapping, or loud computer fans can help keep listeners from becoming distracted and losing the train of thought you are trying to convey.
Text
If you're not a fan of video, it's easy to fall back on printed resources such as textbooks and lecture notes when you start to design an online class. However, keep in mind that in your face-to-face classes you explain and expand on the printed material your students read to help them understand difficult concepts and focus their study. The printed material used in a face-to-face class will never be sufficient for an online class by themselves. If they were, why would anyone come to class? The students need you to further explain, expound, answer questions, and give examples. That said, don't feel like you have to write the next great treatise on your subject. If you have a good variety of content sources using a mix of media the need for additional written resources may be smaller than you think.
Looking at the materials you are planning to provide to your students, where are the gaps? If you have taught this class before you'll know where students commonly have difficulty. It may be a matter of providing bridging explanations, additional examples, a Frequently Asked Questions page, or a glossary of terms they struggle with. When you write for students to read it is best to write in a conversational tone, not like you are writing a journal article. This can be difficult at first but it's really all right to use first and second person pronouns. Also, running your writing through a Readability Checker Links to an external site.is very helpful to catch prose that you think is fine - because it's fine for you to read - but is actually at a higher level than than your students' reading ability.
For example, the previous two paragraphs have a Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score of 62 which is good, about the level of a BBC website. However, the Gunning-Fog score (which weights things a bit differently) is higher at 12, which is about the level of the Harvard Law Review.