Organizing Course Content for Effective Online Learning: Tips and Tools (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hi, this is Laurel Silk at Silkweb Consulting and Development, an e-learning design company based in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about how to organize your course content intuitively for yourself and for your learners. Since you are most likely moving your existing content for the semester online right now, you will want to use a folder system or organize remaining materials by week or due date. You can further create specific categories for things such as instructor contact information, syllabus, assignments, discussions, and other reference materials. You'll want to make sure to post your syllabus and use the announcements page in your LMS. Most classes automatically use an announcement page as the default entry into a course. Right now on my screen, you'll see a blank announcements page in the Blackboard Learn platform. It's very easy to create an announcement. When you do that, all of the students are going to see that when they first log in each time. That's because the announcements page is set as the default. The next item that you're going to want to create is a discussion forum for questions and answers. I would advise students to keep checking and encourage them to ask questions via this forum so that all students can benefit from the Q&A. This will keep your email down and it also enables students to benefit from the answers you provide. So rather than having to answer the same question 15 different times, you can post the question or the student can post the question in the discussion forum and then you can make one reply that the entire class can see. I typically, when I'm teaching online, will advise students to first look for answers in the Q&A forum before they contact me via email. You're also going to want to make sure that you maintain specific office hours, just like you do in your face-to-face classes, and you can list your phone number or a Zoom link or video information so that all students can come to those office hours. So in the following videos, we'll talk about how to set up those virtual office hours and how to create the folder structure that you see here on the side. We'll be doing different things with content areas and tool links. And then in later videos, we'll talk about some of the more complicated matters, such as creating the discussion questions, how do we respond to those, creating assignments and utilizing rubrics. So we'll break it up into smaller video snippets for you and we can kind of tackle those items as they come up.