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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.

Learning objectives help inform students about what they will learn and how they will be assessed. Objectives are meant to align with course expectations. Therefore, any assigned exercises should be guided by the course’s specific learning objectives. Everything in the course should work together to ensure students achieve the course objectives.

Teaching in the online modality can be tricky on its own, so what can you do when you have a large class?

From trivia games to final exams, quizzing tools have a variety of uses for learning as well as assessment. Exams and quizzes have a particularly plentiful range of possibilities in a multimodal or hybrid course, where they can be administered synchronously or asynchronously. Research suggests that the presentation of a tool influences student behavior in response to the tool. When comparing two student discussion boards, one an ungraded discussion and one a graded replacement for a final exam, Cheng et al. (2013) found that students displayed more knowledge on the graded board but more evidence of learning on the ungraded board. The students who participated in the study were more likely to grapple with new ideas when the stakes were low but more eager to showcase topics they were confident about when their responses would have a greater impact on their grades. When considering quizzing tools, we recommend allowing your course goals to guide your usage.

Your class was never intended to be online. It was delivered face-to- face to a live audience. Perhaps it followed that same structure for years. Now, with little warning, it’s an online class. Where do you start? What do you prioritize? And what is essential to create a meaningfully engaging learning experience online? Rapidly transitioning a course to online doesn’t require recreating every element of the face-to-face version.

As an administrator or department chair, you are in a unique position to shape an online program and establish programmatic requirements or recommendations. This is because you have been tasked with taking a broader view of the program, focusing not only on individual course development (as a faculty member might) but also on how an array of courses must be cohesively united to achieve certain goals, values, and accreditation standards. To that end, this piece focuses on why consistency across a program is integral to program quality and student success, and therefore why it falls within your purview to consider standardizing certain elements, requirements, and design choices across all courses in a program.