Creating Online Learning Experiences – A Brief Guide to Online Courses, from Small and Private to Massive and Open

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to provide guidance and advice for instructors who would like to develop an online course. The overall goal is to provide some clarity about many of the steps required to propose and design a course, to describe the resources needed, and to explain the roles of the stakeholders. Online courses generally take much longer to develop than most people realize. The information in this book is very important in that it is based on practical experience gleaned from those that have designed and offered successful courses.

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A tablet showing an e-learning video lesson

Chapters

Chapter 1: Overview of Online Courses

Modern online courses are an extension of older forms of distance learning, going back to mail and correspondence courses of the 1700s (Harting & Erthal, 2005).
Chapter 2: Basic Philosophies

Most (but not all) courses tend to be either focused on the instructor as dispenser of knowledge, or the learner as self-guided constructor of knowledge.
Chapter 3: Institutional Courses

While online courses could potentially cover any topic, your institution or company may have a specific niche within the online learning world that they focus on.
Chapter 4: Production Timelines and Processes

Once you are familiar with online learning in general and the tools you will need, you will need to decide if a MOOC or a regular online course is the right choice for you.
Chapter 5: Effective Practices

In general, there are many different ways to design online courses that work in different contexts, and many ways to design online courses that do not work in various other contexts.
Chapter 6: Creating Effective Course Activities

In order to cross over from passive content consumption into active learning, you will need to make real-life activities the focus of your course content (Hayes, 2015).
Chapter 7: Creating Effective Course Content

In addition to activities, online courses also usually contain content.
Chapter 8: Open Educational Resources

The section on openness in the previous chapter touched on the concept of “open” as being more complex than just “free.”
Chapter 9: Assessment and Grading Issues

Grading and assessment in learning is a complex subject that can (and often does) fill an entire book alone.
Chapter 10: Creating Quality Videos

Video production is a time-intensive process that requires extensive planning and preparation.
Chapter 11: Utilizing Social Learning in Online Courses

You may have noticed that many online courses utilize social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.
Chapter 12: Mindfulness in Online Courses

Online courses have given learners across the globe a unique opportunity to learn outside of formal educational settings and in less supervised environments.
Chapter 13: Advanced Course Design

Much of what this manual covers so far would still fall under the category of traditional or standard online learning.
Chapter 14: Marketing of an Online Course

Now that you have successfully planned your course it is time to tell the world about it and get those enrollment numbers moving.

Conclusion & appendices

Conclusion
Conclusion

There are still many other issues that have not yet been covered.
Bibliography
Bibliography

Every source cited across the chapters.
Links by Chapter
Links by Chapter

The links from each chapter, listed for print users.
About
About

About this reuse of the book.
Authors
Authors

The people behind the book.

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