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It has become certain that flexible teaching will take over as the dominant course delivery method for now and in the future. Hybrid, blended, and hyflex courses allow institutions to ensure accessibility and equality, and at the same time, address learner variability. With the rise of mixed modalities and AI technology, academics face the challenge of creating quality learning experiences that encourage engagement and meaningful interactions, nurture lifelong skills, while reducing academic dishonesty. That’s why faculties need to develop a thorough understanding of different course modalities, and how to best facilitate them. This guide gives an overview of course design and the essential steps to create a quality learning experience.
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Course design refers to the process and methods of building a quality learning environment for students, which supports and appreciates their learning and intellectual development.
Read more: What is course design and why it makes a difference in class?
It has become certain that flexible teaching will take over as the dominant course delivery method for now and in the future. Hybrid, blended, and hyflex courses allow institutions to ensure accessibility and equality, and at the same time, address learner variability. With the rise of mixed modalities and AI technology, academics face the challenge of creating quality learning experiences that encourage engagement and meaningful interactions, nurture lifelong skills, while reducing academic dishonesty. That’s why faculties need to develop a thorough understanding of different course modalities, and how to best facilitate them.
Read more: 4 tips to prepare for hybrid learning
With the rise of online learning and technology implementation in course design, new teaching models and concepts have emerged namely online, hybrid, blended, and hyflex. It is important that instructors develop a shared understanding of these instructional approaches to ensure effective course design and let students know what they are expected to learn and achieve in this new format of learning.
Many people might use the words “hybrid” and “blended” interchangeably, but in fact, they mean different things. That difference lies primarily upon the proportion of face-to-face, online sessions or instructional materials provided in a course.
Blended learning involves a combination of online learning and face-to-face learning, with the digital elements acting as supplementary learning activities. One well known version of blended learning is called Flipping the Classroom.
Hybrid learning is an approach in which a group of students participate online while others are taught on campus. This means that the instructor is teaching both remote and in-person students at the same time.
HyFlex learning is the course format that offers in-person, synchronous, and asynchronous class sessions. Students have the ability to decide on how and when they participate in the course.
Online learning is when all the teaching takes place online, as the teachers use only digital tools to interact with students. Assignments are submitted online, as is feedback. Students and teachers can work together from any location.
Creating a successful course, whether face-to-face, online, or hybrid requires a lot more thought than merely producing study materials and assigning work to students. Think of the course design process as building a house. Though different house types (course design formats) require different procedure, they all come down to these 5 basic steps:
Before you start building a house, you need to determine some general information, like: what types of house you want to build? How many floors will my house have?, etc. Similarly, upon beginning to design a course, instructors need to think about the course type, host platform, teaching tools, and most importantly – the course objectives. Course objectives will act as the northstar for your entire course development process, as all learning activities and assessment practices will be derived from them.
Resources to help you create meaningful learning goals:
1. Bloom's taxonomy and its associated verbs are very useful tools for setting up course objectives.
2. The SMART criteria is also a wonderful framework to help you define the objectives for your students
With education shifting from a teacher-centered to learner-centered approach, there is no excuse not to adopt the available engaging and innovative learning methodologies. Instead of leaning on the traditional lecture approach, instructors can follow plenty of other methods such as Collaborative Learning, Social learning, or Team-Based Learning.
FeedbackFruits Tool Suite provides instructors with plenty of options to exercise the desired teaching method.
Assessment is one of the key elements in course design. Therefore, it is important to decide on which assessment types (formative or summative), as well as specify evaluation criteria to allow for demonstration of knowledge mastery.
FeedbackFruits tools allow for execution of both formative and summative assessment activities, such as quiz, peer feedback, or group projects.
Read more about how to facilitate effective, holistic assessment in our “Assessment series”
Once the course’s goals and assessment have been set, it is time to develop a course “blueprint” which details the learning sequence for your students, along with the resources or activities needed for the course. Marnie Roestel, Associate Professor of Learning Systems Support at Central Michigan University shared great tips on creating a detailed course syllabus, which are:
You can also visit Marnie’s presentation for more tips on student-centered course design.
Now that you have the course blueprint, identify the learning activities that allow students to digest the information and match the chosen teaching methods.
Developing study content is the most time-consuming aspect of course design. Especially in the online/hybrid settings, instructors need to dedicate certain time deciding on the appropriate study materials (assignments, readings, and syllabus), and the order in which they will go.
Below are some suggestions to create interactive, engaging activities for your courses:
1. 5 ways to flip the classroom with Interactive Video
2. Stimulate continuous engagement with Interactive Document
At this point, you should have an entire "draft" of your course. Now it needs some final touch, which is to include the elements of accessibility and interaction.
Make sure the course is accessible and inclusive to everyone, as your students will be attending the course from different parts of the world, from different platforms (in-campus or online) and time schedules. At the same time, leave room for online interactions as well since remote teaching makes up for a large part of the course.
Linda Lee, Director of Instructional Design at the Wharton School shared the 4 principles of inclusive course design to ensure an accessible, responsive learning experience for all students.
At FeedbackFruits, we care deeply about maintaining a fair, inclusive learning environment. That’s why our tools are designed to help faculties promote values of diversity, equity, and inclusion in mind. For example, Interactive Study Material tools and Discussion tools (Discussion on Work and Discussion on Topic) allow instructors to promote frequent interactions across multimedia content, and course modalities (online, hybrid, and hyflex). Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation ensure equal group contribution and participation both asynchronously and synchronously.
For an engineering course at Deakin University, instructor Catherine Fraser issued a year-long project for her students, which ended with a presentation and a poster symposium. However, the COVID outbreak made it impossible to organize this poster conference in-person, requiring a solution that supported online discussion. Catherine decided to use Discussion on Work to facilitate the online symposium, as it allows students to present, view, and comment on each other’s posters.
In total, around 75 students uploaded their work and 70% of them actively contributed to discussions in the tool, writing about 2-4 comments each.
Catherine remarked that the Discussion on Work tool had been an effective “de facto presentation format”, allowing the symposium activity to continue online. Furthermore, the platform was found to be effective for stimulating a discussion among students.
Read the full use case.
Below are some of our curated content (guides, checklists, and more) to help you design the best learning experience
In-depth guide
Use cases:
Articles:
![[New] Competency-Based Assessment](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/3782716/interactive-146849337207.png)
5 ways optimize the team-based learning process with the support of technology
Check out 4 ways to design asynchronous discussions that stimulate critical thinking skills
Discover how to maintain continuous student engagement at every stage of your course using Interactive Document
Explore how to best implement active learning strategies with deep understanding of different modalities
FeedbackFruits announces partnerships with many institutions worldwide over the past 4 months
An overview of the state of competency-based education (CBE) in higher education around the world
We gather the most valuable resources and learnings on pedagogy and email them to you every month.
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