Who Are Your Students & What Are Their Needs - Can You Tell?

Woman Silhouette with question mark Online courses attract a wide student diversity due to its convenient nature. In an online environment, there may not be an opportunity to meet your students "face-to-face." Do you know who your students are? Their abilities? Even if you could see your students, for example, would you be able to tell if he or she needed video captioning? Probably not. 

Design for student success. You'll never know who will be needing additional support. It's much easier to initially design with intention, rather than build your course to support diverse learners in the middle of a semester! 

Where Do I Begin in Designing?

When designing courses, there are two major considerations:

  • Design a course to provide students enough time to complete assignments
  • Give yourself time to design a course that benefits all learners 

Is There Enough Time for My Students?

Think about how timelines impact student. Analyze your audience: how and when do your students access course material? Online courses provide certain degrees of flexibility, which may appeal to students working a full or part-time job, a parent, and also taking multiple courses at a time. Consider designing your course to give students ample time to work on projects or assignments. You can also help remind students of due dates with announcements and prompting students to visit the Course Summary in the Syllabus. Also, make sure students have time to respond to discussions posts. Also, for students who need additional time to complete a quiz, Canvas allows for time extension options for quizzes.  All of these contribute to creating an accessible (and equitable) learning environment. 

How you create course activity timelines greatly impact your students. 

Is There Enough Time for Me to Design an Effective Course For All Of My Students?

Design & Then Develop!

Give yourself time to design and develop a course. Wait, are those two the same thing? Not quite. 

  • Designing is a brainstorming and drafting stage. This could be creating assignments that support course objectives, or curating videos and resources. While there are many programs that Woman Silhouette tilting head to the rightcan be used to design a course, creating a simple outline works just as efficiently. This phase is very time-consuming. 
  • Developing a course is building content and formatting into a Canvas shell.  This phase can be equally time-consuming based on workflow and technology-proficiency. 

3 Levels of Design:

  1. Content: Designing and curating content, mapping out course navigation, adding multiple methods of delivery, and adding various formative and summative assessments 
  2. Usability & Accessibility: Can all of your students access your course?
  3. Technical: Building and formatting content in Canvas

Note: Although these are listed in numerically, Usability & Accessibility Design, Technical Design, and even Content Design can occur simultaneously. 

Pace yourself and give yourself plenty of time to design. All three levels of design take a great amount of time, energy, dedication, and effort!