Course-Building Checklist

Here are a number of techniques and strategies to consider before you start building your course:

Course Starting Point — The Introduction

• Has an e-mail been prepared/sent to your learners informing them about how to gain access your course?
• How will learners contact you? Instruct them to use e-mail and/or use messaging in Moodle.
• If this is a large Moodle site that's part of your organization, is there technical support? Provide learners with technical support contact — you'll save time if someone else can troubleshoot.
• If learners need to use a different language for the browser, how will you get the information to them?
• Will you be using the news forum from day one? How will you inform your learners to begin? READ FIRST PLEASE documents are useful, though the younger generations may skip them altogether if they have login info and can jump straight in.

Course Organization and Design

• Are font styles, content layout, and organization consistent throughout the course? Do you need to follow departmental or organization protocol and design?
• Will you be using an introduction session with a syllabus and course schedule to teach learners how to navigate your course?
• Will you give any type of training and/or introduction on how to use Moodle?
• Are course goals and objectives identified in your syllabus and in your introduction unit?

  Make sure that the goals and objectives in your syllabus also appear in your introduction unit. Even the slightest omission or rewording can cause confusion. I tend to copy pages or upload the whole syllabus just to make sure!

• Are activities and resources organized in a logical and consistent manner as you progress through the duration of the training session or course?
• Do you use your organization's academic calendar if you're teaching by term/semester? Doing so avoids a great deal of confusion. If you use topic/unit organization, you can use the calendar tool and cross reference it.
• Have you posted dates and times for assignments to be submitted and due dates for forum discussions?
• Are objectives measureable and linked to assessments? How will you inform your learners about how you intend to assess them? Setting up a rubric can be useful.
• Does each unit/week include materials as outlined in your syllabus? What method will you be using? Will the method be the same for each module, or will it change from unit/week to unit/week? Either way is fine as long as you inform learners when you divert from your syllabus.
• Do learners know what they need to do to access the first activity and complete it? Have you included this as part of the training discussed earlier?
• Are all assignments and quiz instructions clear? Where can learners access instructions and guidance? Are instructions available per activity in the intro or somewhere else? Be consistent.
• Do learners know how the Assignment module works so that they can submit assignments online?
• Do learners know how to access the forum and chat? Can they learn how to access them as part of training or instructions given when the activity is introduced?
• Is the content interactive?
• If students are asked to respond to other students' discussion forum postings, are deadlines set to enable this? For example, they need to post responses by a certain time and date in order to allow time for comments by you and other students before the discussion forum closes.
• Are learners involved in creating real-world artifacts and/or involved in real-world experiences in the online course?
• What is the mixture of instructional strategies you're providing? Do they support learning goals?
• Are you using multimedia (such as videos, audios, and podcasts)?
• Are students reflecting on course readings, from textbooks, journal articles, and so on?

Involving your learners in collaborative activities

• How will you engage your learners in the course? How will they collaborate with other learners?
• How will learners interact with the content in the course to meet learning objectives? Do your learners have all the software they need? (For example, if you upload PowerPoint files to Moodle, how will you make sure they all have PowerPoint?) Plan for alternatives.
• How will learners be encouraged to be identified and heard in the course? Encourage the use of profiles to build their Moodle persona and communicate with other Moodlers.
• Which activity will require for your learners to collaborate or interact with their peers? How will this be achieved?
• Will learners be meeting online only? Or will they meet both online and offline?

Course Communication

• How will learners be introduced to you and each other?
• Will you make available an area where learners can interact with each other? Will it be an open, free-form area? Creating a general learner forum is one option.
• How will you set up group work or group projects to support communication? Consider using forums, chat, FAQs, and messaging.
• Will learners be given the opportunity to give feedback on the course? How?

Assessment and Evaluation

• Are your instructional and assessment strategies aligned with your objectives?
• Are you using a variety of assessment strategies in the course?
• Will you give learners access to their grades? Will you use the grade book? Will learners be able to compare their assessment to the course average?

Instructor Feedback

• Are students provided with feedback for each activity?
• When will you give feedback? How will the learners be informed that you have given them feedback throughout the duration of the course?

Miscellaneous

• Did you check about copyrights? Your course should not contain anything that is under copyright protection. You need written permission to use content by the author or publisher (including scanned articles and book chapters). You can directly link to Web resources and databases to which you have access. For more information on copyrights, visit these sites:
  • • The Digital Millennium Copyrights Act (DMCA) at www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf
  • • Regarding international copyright, a copyright act that covers all countries does not exist. Refer to www.whatiscopyright.org, which provides information for educational purposes.
• Will anyone other than you have access to your course? Do you need to grand access to assistants, student teachers, guests, mentors, or parents? How will you protect learner information?