Plan

Course team creation

Developing an online course requires team work. We suggest you create a course development team to suit your project requirement. An effective course team consists of a course coordinator, content expert(s), learning developer and teaching assistant(s). To get up to speed quickly; see resource Where to start as a new Teaching Assistant).

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Kick-off meeting

Each course team will be assigned a learning developer from the Extension school who will support you at all phases of the development process. You will meet at the kick-off meeting with your learning developer, Extension School product manager and marketing. In this kick-off meeting, we will discuss the course team and capacity, set the start date, discuss the initial course development process, plan the first follow up meeting, discuss the platform and marketing strategy (including the ‘About Page’), and set milestone deadlines for the months ahead.

This meeting will deliver input for the Blueprint of your course. If needed you will continue working on the Blueprint at the start of the Design workshops.

About page

Enrolments should start as soon as possible, at least 100 days before the start date of the course.  To encourage many participants to enroll, it’s important to create an About page to promote your course. Fill out the About page template – COURSE for individual courses or About page template – PROGRAM for programs. The business team of the Extension School will support you with this. For more details click on the About Page roadmap.

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Course promotion plan

Plan to promote your new online course yourself using the Promotion ideas (website) and by involving your faculty communication office.

The Extension School will support mainly the promotion of paid online courses.

Workshop course design

One of the first steps in designing your online course is a workshop. The Blueprint is the starting point. The workshop is guided by the learning developer. The whole course team, including all lecturers and teaching assistants (and preferably some extra people) collaboratively creates a draft course design.

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Create storyboard

The storyboard contains learning objectives, learning activities, resources and assessment tasks per week/module. 

TU Delft Online education team has crafted the Online Learning Experience model (poster / presentation) which will guide you in designing a high quality online course. The tool will provide insight and help you to reach agreement about the characteristics of your online course.

Here is a storyboard template that you can use to plan each module of your course with activities and resources. As your storyboard builds up you will have your course ready to move into the production phase.

The template is also used with this self-assessment checklist, which explains how to use the template and to check if it is completed. And Bloom’s taxonomy [Creative Commons: BY-NC-SA-3.0] also helps frame your learning objectives. Discuss the tips for Assessment in Online Education with your learning developer to come up with a solid grading rubric.

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Reality check

Furthermore you can consider doing a reality check, which means getting feedback on the course design from people that represent your audience and from colleagues in your field.

Plan additional training

Before going into production, it’s  important to think about what knowledge and skills you and your course team members will need. Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) offers several training courses and workshops on topics related to online education e.g. writing scripts, recording video’s, working in the edX platform and moderating an online course. Please have a look at our training overview and sign up for those relevant to you and your course team members.

We suggest that at least one member of your course team attends the online training ‘Teaching an online course‘ or the ‘Community management workshop‘ (MOOCs only). And of course; join several MOOCs yourself to get familiar with online courses from a students point of view!

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Tour at the New Media Center (NMC)

Before you start recording videos it is recommended to arrange a tour at the New Media Center, so that you are aware of the way they work and what you can expect, even if you don’t intend to record your videos at the NMC.

Create template structure in platform

The learning developer ensures a course will be created for you in the platform and will incorporate the course template.

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Division of tasks and workload

The course design (storyboard) makes clear what has to be done in the production phase. All of these tasks must be divided and planned in time. If you have trouble estimating how much time the different tasks take, then you can consider first producing 1 week completely, including its implementation on the platform.

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Review pilot week

Before going into production, arrange a meeting with your learning developer to review the pilot week.

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Start promotion of the course

In this stage it is time to start carrying out your course promotion plan.

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Prepare proctored exam (if needed)

The learning developer will inform all stakeholders involved in case of a proctored exam (only possible for Online Academic Courses and MicroMasters).