My family and I used to watch a lot of The Great British Baking Show. If you have never seen it, contestants are given incredibly complex baking tasks to be completed in impossibly short time frames, then their artistic work is put on display, tasted, and often harshly criticized on international television for all to see. Then, if they win, they don’t get a massive cash prize — just flowers and an etched glass cake stand. It’s a nice glass cake stand, but considering the very real possibility of public embarrassment they face, the prize is pretty… underwhelming.
Writing an online course can seem similar — monumental task, minuscule time frame, minimal cash rewards.
If you’ve ever tried to write an online course before, you likely found out that it’s a tremendously complex undertaking. Sure, you can slap something together easily enough. It is possible to throw a bunch of YouTube links into a basic course shell, type out a few assignments, and call it an online course, but writing an online course where students actually learn and actually enjoy what they are doing is far more difficult. Here are a few of the biggest challenges our team at StudyForge has faced in our quest to make the best, most effective online courses, and how we have sought to overcome them.
Challenge #1: Keeping It All Organized
One of the first things that a course author will face is the enormity of the task at hand. There are so many things to keep in mind at once. If you’re not careful, you can end up with a “Frankencourse,” with bits and pieces all slapped together haphazardly. What can you do to avoid this? How can you meet all of the learning standards without the course becoming a gargantuan, overwhelming mess?
1) Outline With Experts
In the outlining process, we make sure we have at least three subject specialists in a room (or a Zoom room) together, swapping ideas and hammering out a detailed outline. We want to make sure that we have a solid foundation for the course before anything is written. Even if we end up diverting from the outline once the writing process begins — and we almost always do — at least there is a structure to return to for reference.
2) Have One Lead Writer
We have found it to be very difficult to have a unified course if there are multiple authors involved. The writers’ voices can be different, the pedagogy can be different, topics can easily get missed or doubled up, and the lack of flow within lessons can be disruptive to students. We have found that having one person in charge who can oversee the whole project is helpful.
Challenge #2: Keeping It All Engaging
If we are not careful, an online course can get very boring. While we, as the author, might be enthralled by a comparative analysis of Victorian novels or the beauty of an elegant math proof, chances are, our students will need a little something extra to keep their focus and take their earbuds out. How can we keep our courses engaging?
1) Mix It Up
Make sure you are using a variety of media to present your content. If you are creating a reading, make sure you add in visual elements and images. Break your lesson into smaller chunks with videos, interactive games, fun quizzes, and off-the-computer activities.
2) Add Humor
A little humor can go a long way, so where you can, sprinkle a little into your courses. I recommend being careful about putting jokes in readings, though, because your “tone” cannot be read as easily. Students (and their parents) can sometimes miss a joke and become confused or offended. However, when there is room to make a little joke, particularly in a video or audio segment, make it happen.
3) Make Your Boring Stuff Your Best Stuff
If you are trying to meet a learning standard that you think is a little on the boring side, turn your creativity up to 11. There are more specific tips about how to do this in the article, “Five Ways to Make the Boring Stuff Your Best Stuff.”
Challenge #3: Keeping It Accessible
As educators, we all know that not every student arrives in our class or online learning space with the same skills, abilities, or desire to learn. It’s best to avoid assumptions about who is taking your course and what skills they possess. Also, anecdotally, online schools often report abnormally high proportions of students with unique learning needs. Making online courses that are appropriately accessible for this wide variety of students can feel daunting. How can courses be accessible for our struggling students but still provide challenging opportunities for our superstars?
1) Provide Multiple Paths to Success
Learning is going to look different for different people, so you want to make sure you are laying out paths to success for students with very different profiles. In our math courses, for example, there are practice questions that are required for everyone, but also enrichment questions to help students who need a challenge extend their learning. In many of our courses, we provide choice in projects so that students can show what they know in a way that feels comfortable to them.
2) Follow the "Rules", or Make Some
Our team has a number of rules that we follow to guide our writing process. For example, every lesson should be bite-sized — able to be finished in a single sitting — with a maximum of five minutes per grade level per lesson. This means a 10th grade lesson should take a maximum of 50 minutes for the average student. Instructional videos need to be less than five minutes unless absolutely necessary; language needs to be accessible, and any unfamiliar words need to be defined. Having rules like this in place can prevent students from getting overwhelmed.
3) Look For That Goldilocks-Sweet-Spot of Difficulty
You want your students to be challenged, but not overwhelmed. You don’t want to make things so easy that your students never have to struggle, but you don’t want them to be crushed to the point where they give up. Do what you can to find that “just right” level of difficulty.
Challenge #4: Keeping It Unified
One of the most frustrating and panic-inducing things as a student is the feeling of writing a test and thinking, “I’ve never learned this before.” I remember an Anatomy and Physiology exam I took in university that still causes me to shudder. For an online course to be fair and successful, it is critical that there is unity between what is taught, what is practiced, and what is assessed.
- If you did not teach it, students shouldn’t need to practice it.
- If students didn’t practice it, you shouldn’t assess it.
I don’t believe in “surprises” on a test or in a final assessment. Of course, it is good to include challenging questions on a test, but only if you have already taught the material. There should be no “Let’s see who the really smart kids are” type of questions.
How do you make sure there is unity between instruction, practice, and assessment?
1) Have One Non-Expert Reviewer
If you are writing a course, you are a subject specialist. Your review team will probably be subject experts as well. If that’s the case, there is a danger that you will not realize some of the places where students will get stuck. If you have a manager or reviewer who does not know the material to begin with, they are more likely to catch discontinuity between instruction, practice, and assessment.
2) Have a Single Overseer
As was mentioned, it is best to have one person in charge of a whole lesson, unit, or course. That way, they can have eyes on the learning process and hopefully avoid unpleasant assessment surprises.
3) Take the Time to do a Holistic Review Once the Course is Built
After everything has been written and uploaded into your learning management system, do a complete front-to-back review of the whole course. Pretend you are a student who is seeing the material for the first time. Click on every link; open every practice question and do every quiz. There is no substitute for getting in there and looking at everything yourself, and it will save a lot of students a lot of headaches if you do.
There is no sugar-coating it: Creating an online course is a monumental task, and your taste-testers can be every bit as harsh as the judges on The Great British Baking Show. With a great plan and a great team around you, though, it is possible. And who knows? If you get the recipe just right, you might just change your students’ lives.
That’s a way better reward than a glass cake stand.
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