Online Course Model That Will Make Your Teacher Life Easier

You are a teacher, and you are busy. You need an online course that will not suck all of your time! I've taught this way for multiple semesters and it's been amazing every time. Here's how you can do it:

The 2-Week Module

Think of a module as a unit. The 2-week module has all readings, videos, etc.--any learning materials--for students to review asynchronously. Of course, you are welcome to hold synchronous sessions for students to ask questions, but I urge you to have these be more informal and student driven--let them bring the topics to discuss (or just make it a social hour!) You can have short, low-stakes/no-stakes quizzes after the content to help with retention (research shows this works!), but make sure you use multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank and let your Learning Management System (LMS) auto-grade for you--we are saving you time here! You'll want to load in automated feedback so students can learn why their answer was incorrect.

The 2nd week involves all of the interacting with the content. This interaction is where learning really happens! If you remember Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (2001) (and if not, click the link to learn more), Create is what we want to spend the most time on. Week 2 is devoted to Create!

During Week 2, your students do activities such as responding to a discussion board, posting in a FlipGrid, making a video, submitting writing assignments, etc (and always provide a rubric!). You can have multiple assignments, but I caution you from having too many--you have to grade them after all! TIP: Make all assignments due on the same day. For example, in my course, assignments were always due on Tuesdays. Students could submit the assignments at any time, but the due date was a Tuesday of the 2nd week (our weeks ran from Wednesday - Tuesday, since school started on a Wednesday). This helped students stay organized (remembering due dates was easy) and helped me with grading.

If your students need support to be able to get all weekly assignments done by the weekly due date, hold a synchronous session "check-in" mid second week to make sure students aren't getting stuck. I also encourage you to be flexible with the deadline. If they were late with an assignment, but it didn't really put a kink in your grading, consider letting it go. If it becomes a repetitive problem, chat with the student about what is going on. You may eventually dock points for late work--that will be at your discretion.

A caveat: If you begin dividing your course into the 2-week module model, you may find that you have more material than you can reasonably squeeze in. I encourage you to be fully honest with yourself and question what you need. Don't include an article or reading just because you really like it. Ask if there is truly information that students will get from this article that they can't get elsewhere, or that they can't get from a summary video you could create (where you could talk about multiple articles!). The same goes for activities--focus on Revised Bloom's and prioritize activities that are towards the top of the model. You don't need multiple create activities for a unit--just one. You don't want to overwhelm yourself or your students!

Example of 2-Week Module Course

I made this video so you could see the 2-week module in action in this course that I taught.

Questions? Comments? Leave them below or contact me.