Designing online courses

Due to the recent pandemic, educators around the globe were literally forced to quickly resort to some kind of distance learning, which was then dubbed as “emergency remote teaching”. The reason to come up with a a different label is due to the fact that what we have witnessed – the quick switch from offline traditional forms of teaching to online teaching – was not anyhow planned and the delivery of content suitably designed. Whether this is something negative or positive depends on the actual cases. However, in general, it is important to draw the distinction between emergency remote teaching and distance learning. As mentioned, the main reason is that the former implies making a number of decisions not as the course has already started, but before.

In this video Emanuele Bardone from the University of Tartu provides an introduction with a number of topics that one might consider when designing an online course. The video addresses issues such as the pedagogical framework to deploy, the type of assignment, the materials to use and the type of synchronous activities to perform.