Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to our second video on OWL course organization when rapidly putting your course online. This video expands on the principles of simple and deep course design to demonstrate how you can create clear pathways for students to navigate through your course content. You want students to know, even when you're not physically present, how to find course content, how to engage with it and with you and with other students, and when they need to meet the course milestones or deadlines. In this series of videos, we're assuming that you have a course already and you're looking to put it rapidly online. In this video, we'll talk about the differences between resources and lessons tools and how to use them to support student learning and engagement in your course. Both have important uses, but one provides a more guided and powerful learning experience for students where they can track their own progress through the course. To that end, we'll also explore how to connect elements of a lesson or unit to create clear learner pathways through the course. Again, a goal is simple and deep course design that allows students to engage with the course content, activities, and assessments rather than expending their cognitive energy on trying to find the course content and navigate your course. Your careful attention to course organization gives them the tools that they need to do that. For that reason, in this video, we are concentrating on instructor and cognitive presence, although it may very well be that some of the activities you plan for students also promote social presence through encouraging students to engage with each other as well as co-construct their own learning experiences. Let's start by looking at the resources tool as a way to share content with students. The resources area of the course allows you to file and share any artifact you create for the course. This could include videos, lecture notes, PowerPoints, images, web links, or assignment instructions. Really, anything that can be saved as a file or a web link can go here. In this sense, the resources acts as a repository for course material. Create a file system that works for your course and be sure to clearly label all your files so that their content is obvious without having to open the file. A well-organized and labeled resources area of the course will enable you and your students to find course materials quickly. In this first example, we see that the instructor has chosen to group materials by week with a separate file for assessment guidelines. In the second example, the instructor uses a file system related to the specific elements of the course such as assignments, lessons, and the syllabus. How you organize your resources folder is up to you, but by taking the time to decide what your file structure will be before you start adding content to the course, you'll save you and your students time searching for materials. And you can also hide all or even some of the resources content from students if it's not appropriate to share it. You can learn more about how to use this tool by following the OWL resources tool link below this video. So the resources tool is an ideal way to upload and organize main learning artifacts in your course, but it's also an example of complex course design because this resources tool is meant to be a course repository and so it offers little in the way of guidance for students trying to navigate through the course. To make learning both simple and deep, we turn to the course lessons tool. The course lesson tool allows you to create links between the course content you've placed in your resources as well as providing simple navigational pathways through the course for your students. You should create a landing page for each main lesson or unit in your course. A landing page introduces students to the topic and tells them how to navigate it. By consistently using a landing page that maintains the same form across your units or lessons, you'll develop a rhythm so that students always know where to look for information. And to that end, always think about how you can organize the course so that it creates a predictable rhythm or set of activities because this helps students better manage their time. The lesson tool also has several key features that enables you to organize the course content so that learning is both simple and deep. Let's take a look at an example of a landing page and note some of the key features. Here we see the lessons tool used to organize information for students about what they will be doing over the next two weeks. A short instructor video introduces the course content, expectations, and learning outcomes related to this part of the course. Students can also download a script of the video. The lessons material is further chunked into smaller sections by using the sub-pages feature of OWL and all the lessons are organized together in one section of the page. The content link feature of the tool lesson is used to link to the assignment instructions that were placed in the resources folder earlier and a direct link to the assignment where students should submit this work is also provided. Lastly, to help students navigate all of this content, the instructor is used a checklist feature which provides a simple step-by-step list of how students should work their way through the course content, how and when to interact with each other, and when and how to submit the elements of the assignment. This overview page encourages a simple and deep learning environment, a simple pathway to navigate the next two weeks of the course by engaging deeply with a few specific tools that students can easily follow in an asynchronous learning environment. Although you as the instructor may not be physically present, your presence will still be felt by students as they experience how you have organized the course and directed them through it. The AQ Provide a Module Roadmap link below this video suggests key items to include on your overview page. You can use the OWL Lessons Help page or our previously recorded webinar on using the lessons tool to learn how to set up a lessons page like this one. But to give a quick overview, sections are added to any lessons page by clicking on the plus icon to the right of any lessons page. If the page is new and has nothing on it yet, you'll see an add content button at the top of the page instead. Both options bring up this menu which allows you to add text to a page or embed content from your resources files such as videos, PDF documents, or images. And you can also add subpages. Each subpage is just another lessons page like this one or your overview page that has the same editing options as your landing page. These subpages enable you to break up your lesson or unit into more manageable chunks which we'll talk about in a minute. From this menu, you can also add section breaks and column breaks which allow you to create visual dividers on the page and create categories of information such as an area where all the subpages are in the lesson or an area on assignments. You can also use this editor to create direct links to existing course assignments, forums, and tests and quizzes. Lastly, this option will allow you to add a checklist which students can use to monitor their progress as they go through the course material. Clicking on these icons will allow you to either edit or delete content that you've already added to your lessons page. You'll also notice that at the top of each page is a reorder option which allows you to reorder all the elements on your lessons page by simply dragging and dropping each item. You can also delete items if you wish to. Remember to break your lesson, unit, or module content into smaller chunks. Chunking refers to presenting information in small units in order to reduce the cognitive load on the students. To chunk information, think of your course as a series of topics within lessons or units. This is where the subpages feature in lessons tools plays an important role. By focusing on one main topic or idea on each subpage, you can present information to students in manageable chunks and build on concepts of future topics. By spending some time mapping your course content into chunks before creating it, you can really become efficient and effective when creating your course design. Some guidelines when you're thinking about chunking information are using the subpages to establish natural breaks between main topic ideas, using micro-lectures by keeping videos and narrated PowerPoints between 5 and 7 minutes, keeping written paragraphs short between about 3 and 5 sentences, and using the white space in between paragraphs. Use the section break feature and formatting tools in OWL to organize your information, and where applicable, use bullet points and numbering. Above all, focus on the most relevant information, and keep your information and your text very concise. Finally, here's one more quick tip to help you keep your course easily navigable for students. You can use the Site Info tool to organize and hide menu tabs in your course. When clicking on the Tool Order tab in the Site Info tool, you'll be able to drag and drop the order of the menu tools that you want students to see. We suggest putting the tools that the students will use most frequently near the top of the menu. In addition, think carefully about renaming tools that students commonly use. For example, students are used to seeing the Forums tool labeled as Forums, so you'll probably not want to change this. However, you'll have a lot more leeway when it comes to renaming your lessons. This concludes our video series on OWL course organization when rapidly designing for an online course. Through this two-video series, we've talked about using the Overview page to create immediate instructor presence in the course, as well as how to use tools such as announcements, calendars, syllabus, and checklists to establish and communicate course expectations. We've also explored how to organize the Resources area of the course so that it's easy to locate content such as videos, lecture notes, images, and web links. Moving beyond the resources, we've talked about the importance of the Lesson tool and how it can promote a deep and simple approach to student learning by simplifying course navigation, connecting course materials, and allowing students to track their progress through the course. Finally, we've explored the concept of chunking course materials so that information is presented to students in small units, as well as how to organize your course menu tabs so that students can find information more easily. We hope you've found this series of videos helpful in designing your online course.