How can I help students to navigate my online course effectively?

Include introductory instructions

When getting started, provide students with details about how the course site is structured and where they will find different components of the course.  You can do this through an announcement, an email, a brief guide, or any combination that works for you. To familiarize students with the course, you might consider having them complete a course tour or scavenger hunt.

Maintain consistency

However you decide to structure your course, be sure to keep it consistent.  This makes it easy for students to navigate since they’ll know where to find different components.  You may want to check with other instructors in your area.  If there’s a common way that courses are structured within your program or School, following that template can make it easier for students to navigate your site.

Reduce course layers

When organizing your content in the Brightspace Content tool, try to limit yourself to a single layer of sub-folders. Having to access a folder within a folder within another folder makes it more difficult for students to find course materials.  The fewer the number of clicks required to get to course content, the better.

Point students directly to content using Quicklinks

Directing students to the content or materials that they need can go a long way towards simplifying navigation and limiting how many times they need to click to access what they need.  For instance, when creating an announcement to remind students about an upcoming assignment or activity, you can embed a Quicklink to that assignment or activity directly into your Announcement.  This will allow students to click on that link and go directly to the relevant area within your course site.

Include links in a Documents and Resources folder

Putting links to content, assessments, and other course components into a dedicated folder in each module can make it easier for students to get to what they need.  Links can be created for content, assessments, tools, and websites. You can also use the same folder to keep important documents you may have referenced in the module in one convenient place students can access quickly.

Incorporate a weekly agenda or checklist

If you’d like students to work through a number of different topics or activities in a given week or unit, consider setting out an agenda or checklist that tells students what they should complete, in what order, and that estimates the length of time they should spend on each element. This type of guidance will remind students of important course elements while also helping them plan and manage their time effectively. You can easily create a Checklist in Brightspace using the Checklist Tool.

How can I help students to understand how specific pieces of content and activities contribute to their learning?

Chunk your content

In online courses, keeping students’ attention is important.  Breaking content into chunks makes it easier for students to stay engaged and maintain focus.  Generally speaking, an individual course component, such as a video or a slide deck, shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes for the average student to review.  So, if you were translating a traditional 60 minute face-to-face lecture into an online course, you may want to create five or six 10 minute video segments that students can review and make notes on independently.

Present content in multiple ways

Presenting content using a variety of media (i.e. slides, a reading, and a lecture video) is a recommended Universal Design for Learning (UDL) practice and helps to keep students engaged because they always have something new to focus on.  For instance, you might create a narrated PowerPoint recording for a specific topic in your course and then supplement that video by having students read an article, watch a relevant TED talk, and then complete a short quiz to cement their learning.  Presenting the same information through different media allows students to engage with the content in multiple ways and gives them more opportunities to gain key understanding.

Provide contextual information for all course elements and activities

Individual course components will make more sense for students when preceded by some information that helps to explain what each component aims to achieve and how these elements link together.  For instance, if you’ve asked students to watch a specific video, you may want to add a description in Blackboard that tells students why this video is relevant to the course and offer them some direction on how they may want to take notes or what key aspects of the video they should pay specific attention to.

Communicate clearly with students

When communicating with students, try not to assume that they know the vocabulary or jargon for the field, or even that they’re comfortable working in English. Simple, straightforward, and concise language will be most accessible for students.

Clarify specific vocabulary, terminology, and symbols

Explaining terms, providing a glossary, and focusing on language that doesn’t rely on figures of speech or idioms that may be difficult for non-native English speakers can help to improve the clarity of course communication.

• Clarifying vocabulary and symbols
  • http://udlguidelines.cast.org/representation/language-symbols/vocabulary-symbols
• Clarifying syntax and structure
  • http://udlguidelines.cast.org/representation/language-symbols/syntax-structure
• Clarifying text, notation, and symbols
  • http://udlguidelines.cast.org/representation/language-symbols/text-notation-symbols
• Promoting understanding across languages
  • http://udlguidelines.cast.org/representation/language-symbols/understanding-across-languages

How can I organize my course materials effectively?

Use high-level folders to organize content and materials

If you have a fair amount of content, activities, and assessments in your course, course folders can be an effective way of aggregating like materials and making them easier for students to find.  Course content can be organized into folders in a number of different ways to make it easier for students to locate and follow. You could consider organizing your content into folders by module (i.e. Module 1: Topic Name, Module 2: Topic Name, Module 3: Topic Name). You can also create folders to organize your materials by type so students can access them quickly outside of the actual lesson (i.e. Lecture Slides, Readings, Videos, Quizzes).

Maintain module-to-module consistency where possible

Structuring content for each module in a similar way will help students know what to expect and provide consistency. You might consider creating a basic template for yourself to follow.  For instance, you might start each module with a reading and a narrated PowerPoint recording, have a learning activity somewhere in the middle, and conclude by asking students to reflect on their learning by responding to a discussion question.

Schedule your content release

To keep students on track and to prevent them from rushing ahead, many instructors choose to time the release of their content.  Even if you want to pre-load all of your content, you can use the Start/End/Due date settings in Brightspace to control when content becomes available to students. If you limit the availability for a folder, everything within that folder will be hidden until the availability date. You can also make use of Release Conditions so that content only becomes available after a student has successfully met certain criteria within the course.