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Formatting Content: Personal Experience Insights
In our Personal Experience Insights series, members of the Everspring Learning Design department share first-hand accounts of creating online learning content and meaningful takeaways from their professional experiences.
Incorporating Multimedia in Your Course
Multimedia, which helps create an engaging and interactive online learning environment, has been shown to contribute to improved student performance (Cheng et al., 2009, p. 1). Though many online courses incorporate videos, they neglect to feature other forms of multimedia. And, while videos are a staple of multimedia use, there are other exciting options to consider: podcast episodes, graphics, and animations can all enhance course content, enriching the student experience. To maximize the benefits multimedia can provide, consider including these underutilized forms of multimedia in your course.
Inclusive Citation
Inclusive citation practices can empower educators to cultivate equity, enrich academic discourse, and create welcoming learning environments. By prioritizing diverse perspectives and ensuring the representation of underrepresented voices, instructors can address systemic inequities in scholarship and amplify marginalized contributions. Such efforts not only deepen students’ critical engagement with course materials but also foster a sense of belonging, preparing them to thoughtfully navigate an increasingly interconnected world.
Academic Integrity in Assessment
To foster academic integrity, pair anti-plagiarism tools with clear conduct expectations and authentic low-stakes assessments. When designing and teaching online courses, maintaining academic integrity is frequently top of mind. In many cases, faculty may opt to adopt third-party tools to monitor student work. Despite the prevalence of academic monitoring software in online courses, the most powerful tools for promoting academic integrity are introduced much earlier in the course-build process.
Six Strategies for Multimodal Content Delivery
If you’re developing a course with synchronous and asynchronous elements, you have a host of options for engaging students and delivering content. Research suggests that incorporating multiple modalities increases accessibility, engagement, and learning (Mick and Middlebrook, 2015; Margolis et al., 2017). With that said, it is important to be intentional about multimodal course design. Both synchronous and asynchronous methods of delivery are effective, but activities can be better suited to one or the other modality and synchronous time is often limited. Delivering selected content asynchronously can support students’ understanding of how information is organized and leave more time for interactivity in synchronous sessions.
Selecting Supplemental Resources: Personal Experience Insights
In our Personal Experience Insights series, members of the Everspring Learning Design department share first-hand accounts of creating online learning content and meaningful takeaways from their professional experiences.
Adult English Language Learners
Many existing best practices for course builds can be leveraged to support English language learners (ELLs). While designing your online course, consider ELLs and the diverse linguistic and cultural knowledge they bring to the classroom.
Introduction to Competency-Based Education
As higher education evolves to meet the needs of today’s diverse learners, competency-based education (CBE) is gaining traction for its student-centered approach and promises of affordability and workplace preparation. According to a 2020 survey, 128 unique institutions were operating a total of 1,057 CBE programs between 2018 and 2020, and 82% of responding institutions expected CBE programs to grow further between 2020 and 2025 (American Institutes for Research [AIR], 2021). While interest in CBE may be growing, most institutions remain in the early planning stages.
Best Practices to Support Students With Cognitive Disabilities
Cognitive disabilities are common among adults in the United States and are especially prevalent among young adults (Okoro et al., 2018). Such disabilities impact mental functions such as memory, attention, perception, and calculation, among others. As a result, students with cognitive disabilities may struggle with academic tasks generally—and online coursework specifically—in unique ways (Petretto et al., 2021; Reyes et al., 2022). Since online courses are often text-heavy, for example, students with dyslexia may find them more challenging to navigate than on-ground classes (Chen et al., 2015). Students with cognitive disabilities may also struggle with navigating inconsistent online course layouts, comprehending complicated directives, and engaging with non-essential course components. Finally, when online courses are large or impersonal, students with cognitive disabilities may have difficulty focusing on assignments and other coursework (The Best Schools, 2024).
Developing Instructional Materials
Once you have defined the learning objectives for your course, you can begin to develop assessments to ensure students achieve those objectives. Once you have created assessments, you can begin to develop materials to ensure students succeed on those assessments. This backward design process—which moves from objectives to assessments and finally to materials—is known as learning-centered instruction, and it directs every course task toward the development of certain skills and competencies. This piece focuses on the third stage of this process, the development of high-quality instructional materials, beginning with the idea that robust and engaging online courses contain a mix of created and curated content. Below, you will find guidelines for creating and curating instructional materials to help you achieve the optimal balance for your course.