A client of mine recently asked me to look through her online course and provide feedback. I did what I always do in this situation: launched the course and went through it as if I were a student. I read the text, looked at the images, watched the videos, completed the activities, and painstakingly captured all of my observations in a google doc I also had open. The overall look and feel as well as basic course design was solid. The course worked with, rather than against, the existing design of the learning management system. Learners could intuitively tell where they were and what they were supposed to do next. Both the course and the individual lessons had learning objectives and the content itself was a good mix of text, images, figures and tables, and short video clips.
At the macro level, however, the course had a key challenge common to so many online courses. There was simply too much content and detail. I felt like I was being hit left and right with new terminology and new paradigms for making sense of all that I was being exposed to without a clear sense of what mattered and where to focus. Was I supposed to be memorizing everything? Was I meant to make sense of the different terms in relation to each other? Was I supposed to read all of the content found at links integrated throughout the pages? How did everything I was encountering connect to the big picture and goals for the course?
When I provided the feedback and debriefed with my client, she told a typical story of faculty everywhere in that she had to create the online course without enough preparation time and therefore needed to quickly repurpose content from an in-person offering of the course. When we started discussing my observations that there was “too much” content but not enough clarity about what learners were supposed to be doing with all of the terminology and frameworks she stated simply: “in the face-to-face version all of that comes out in the discussions.” And, then she had the quick lightbulb moment of “Oh! We aren’t discussing them in the online version!” (Note: this is not a plug for simply turning an in-class discussion into a threaded online discussion as that rarely works as you hope.) The important thing here is that she didn’t intentionally leave out the discussions. Instead, in her rush to get the course out there, she focused almost entirely on “getting the content up,” forgetting all of the other crucial education experiences that happen in-person.
And, I was reminded, once again, that ALL that you do in your in-person course without even consciously thinking about it gets lost in your online course if you don’t intentionally design for it.
Your presence, your voice, your direct interactions with your students, your discussion facilitation, etc. Content is the least of your worries. Learning facilitation is what you should be focusing on. Not how do I “move what I do f2f into an online format?” but “given these learning goals/objectives for this course, how do I design this experience so that learners achieve them?” This experience, profound perhaps because it is so commonplace, also demonstrated that in spite of our multiple semesters of emergency remote teaching during COVID, it’s still so easy to forget all of the crucial implicit elements of in-person learning facilitation that have to be explicitly designed for in online learning.