This is the fun part of creating your course! Start laying the foundation for a strong course by:
- carefully considering and writing clear objectives,
- assigning meaningful assessments and
- finding or creating engaging content.
We have created a useful tools to help: the Course Blueprint. It’s important to keep in mind web accessibility and principles of universal design for any online course, so see the resources below to guide you.
To Do in this Lesson
- Using the Course Blueprint, lay out your course objectives, topics, content and assessments
Course Blueprint
The blueprint is a “bird’s eye view” of your course that functions as an outline of your topics, objectives, resources, and assessments. It helps you to consider course flow and connections. Use this tool to map out the lessons that make up your course. After you’re done, you can transfer each lesson into a Google doc to flesh out the rest of your content.
- Course Blueprint Template (Google Spreadsheet)
Example Course Blueprint
- Completed Course Blueprint Example (Google Spreadsheet)
- Dr Brent Edwards used the course blueprint template to outline his new EDEF course in this example.
Components of the Course Blueprint
- Determine lesson topics and objectives.
- What do you want your course to accomplish overall? How does that break down into lessons? What do you want your students to know or do after each lesson?
- Write objectives for your lessons – there are advantages and disadvantages to showing them or not showing them to students.
- Consider providing written or visual advanced organizers which can help students make connections with previously learned information or understand why what they are learning is important (essential questions) and/or relevant to them
- Assessments
- Make sure your assessments are aligned with your objectives – in other words, are you assessing your students on what they are learning?
- If you have a culminating assessment, how are you scaffolding toward it?
- Are you considering various assessment types?
- Are students using engaging technology tools to complete assessments?
- Are students given any choices?
- Finding Content & Media