When you are teaching a face-to-face course, you have some freedom to provide assignment instructions to your students that are somewhat imprecise. This is because you have the opportunity to provide further clarification or to answer any questions in person when your students are right in front of you. In an online course, however, assignment… Read More

An important part of maintaining online course materials is keeping them up to date. Over time, an online course can become out of date as textbooks are updated, current events change, or new research occurs within a particular field of study. Sometimes the motivation for updating online course materials is pedagogical: It’s clearly important pedagogically… Read More

Having spent over a decade training and mentoring educational content developers and instructional designers, I have come to the conclusion that there are two qualities (or perhaps personality traits) that are nearly impossible to teach to someone who doesn’t already possess them: precision and creativity, both of which are important for creating effective and engaging… Read More

As any current or former math student knows, “Check your work” has been a constant refrain of teachers through the ages. In fact, “Check your work” is good advice for any project you are working on, educationally, professionally, or personally. Checking your work is an important part of online course writing, as it should be… Read More

While the pedagogical creativity inherent to creating an engaging online learning experience should not be understated, an equally important aspect of online course design is the production workflow. The creation of any product, whether tangible or intangible, has constraints of time frame, checkpoints, and quality control, all of which are important aspects of online course… Read More

Teaching is largely a performative art, often with a visual component. A good teacher, armed with nothing more than a whiteboard and a marker, can bring concepts to life through narrative and hand-drawn illustrations. Many teachers have intuitive mastery of this whiteboarding skill, such that they don’t need to spend much time thinking about what… Read More

At its best, there is a playful hands-on aspect to the creative design process. Well-known creative and innovative product design studios (say, the design studios at Apple or LEGO) are known both for their creativity and for their designers’ hands-on exposure to the raw materials from which a product will be designed and eventually manufactured…. Read More

A common concern about online courses is that they can be impersonal, with communication between instructors and students often being faceless and asynchronous. Although there are various collaboration and communication tools available to enable real-time communication, one of the simplest things you can do to make an online course more personal for students is to… Read More

The rise of email communication in the 1980s and ’90s led to an increase in collaboration on content development projects of all sorts, as it became easy to email word processor files back and forth between collaborators and stakeholders. Emailing files back and forth was certainly cheaper than flying to meet in person and faster… Read More

Quizzes and exams often make one crucial pedagogical mistake: they do not ask enough reasoning questions. Reasoning questions, simply put, are questions that ask about the reason why an answer to another question is correct. For any given quiz or exam question, there is always an implicit chain of reasoning from the given information to… Read More

Everyone knows that laughter is the best medicine, but not everyone may realize that it can also be an effective (and affective!) pedagogical tool. I learned a lot about using humor in online education when I was asked to write a demo course about the care and keeping of household refrigerators. The subject practically obligated… Read More

Authors of online course materials are usually selected for a combination of their subject matter expertise, their pedagogical prowess, and their experience in the classroom. Course writers, however, sometimes struggle to translate what they do effectively in the classroom into the new medium of online course development. Pedagogically effective instructors use a number of techniques… Read More

The term “minimalism” has mixed connotations. On the one hand, minimalism can have a negative connotation of missing out on some of the good things in life, a type of self-imposed spartanism. On the other hand, minimalism can also connote an elegant simplicity, choosing to focus on the things that are really important and to… Read More