Online Teaching

Course Design

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Image of four of Dalhousie's instructional technologists providing Brightspace support from their homes. Links to virtual support room in Bb Collaborate.

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Virtual Brightspace Support is available for Dalhousie instructors:

Monday‒Friday: 9 a.m.‒8 p.m. (Atlantic)
Saturday‒Sunday: 9 a.m.‒3 p.m. (Atlantic)

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Quality courses share the same foundational elements that underpin their design, regardless of whether the class is held online, blended, or face-to-face. Although classes will vary greatly depending on the subject matter, the level of the class, and your individual teaching style, learning outcomes are key in any course design. Of equal importance are the assessments that measure students’ achievement of those outcomes and activities that give students opportunities to practice the skills or apply the concepts they are learning.

Getting Started: Course design takes a “backward” approach that starts with writing of learning outcomes, designing a syllabus, and creating a course orientation for your students.

Assessments: Assessments may require some creative thinking on how to adjust them for the online space, while still evaluating students’ learning.

Activities: Activities that encourage students to create and share their ideas with other learners facilitate active learner-centered engagement and student collaboration, crucial for a positive student experience.

Interaction and Presence: Interactions should provide opportunities for instructors and students to exchange substantive ideas related to content, ask questions, and provide feedback about the course.

Content: Content in an online course can take advantage of both digital and traditional media, and should both support students’ learning and be varied to accommodate the breadth of students’ strengths and preferences.

Help with Course Design: Staff and faculty at Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT), Academic Technology Services (ATS), and Dalhousie Libraries are available to support your online teaching.

Academic Integrity

Support students in adhering to academic integrity through communicating clear expectations, reiterating campus guidelines, and giving students opportunities to ask questions.

Online Exam Toolkit

Thoughtfully design and create online exams and communicate these choices to your students by using the Online Exam Toolkit.

Core Principles

Students should expect their courses are built around six core principles fundamental to online teaching: Accessibility and Inclusivity, Flexibility, Interactivity, Clear Communication, Instructor Presence, and Supports. These principles aim to assist all course instructors at Dalhousie and King's to prepare, design, and deliver online teaching.

Accessibility and Inclusivity

You should strive to design a course that is universally accessible. The principles of Universal Design for Learning, a learner-centred framework that guides course design and delivery to support all students in their learning, is a start to designing courses that are accessible and inclusive.

Other measures you can take toward accessibility and inclusion include:

Proving all students with equitable access to course content and assessments.
Implementing student accessibility plans, which may include accommodations or other forms of support
Complying with the developing requirements set by the Nova Scotia Accessibility Act of 2017.
Considering ways to address any socio-cultural and economic consequences of online instruction for students in keeping with Dalhousie's equity, diversity, and inclusion priorities.
Ensuring your courses are accessible and navigable by assistive technologies
Adopting open educational resources (open textbooks), where appropriate, to help mitigate costs and make learning materials more accessible to all students.

Flexibility

Making course content available to students asynchronously (pre-recorded content) enables students to watch or listen at their own pace and on their own time and ensures students in different time zones or with other responsibilities are not disadvantaged in their learning experience.

However, the context of your course, its content, and your discipline matters. There is also value in including synchronous (live) course components where students have an opportunity to engage with the instructors, TAs, and other students in the course; ask questions; and engage in dialogue and problem solving. Such sessions would ideally be recorded for those unable to attend. Optional drop-in office hours are another way to engage students synchronously.

Assessments should, whenever possible, provide flexibility by giving students options for how they can demonstrate what they have learned and how they have met the course learning outcomes. This is also an effective strategy to increase inclusion and accessibility in online classes.

Interactivity

In large classes, consider using breakout rooms (synchronous) or smaller group discussions/projects (asynchronous) to increase student interaction within the course. As well, if you have TAs assigned to your course, it is important to think about how to maximize their potential to support student interaction within the course.

The same as you will be giving students feedback on their performance, you might consider creating opportunities for students to give you feedback about the course. In addition to end-of-term course evaluations (Student Learning Experience Questionnaires), you might solicit feedback from students midterm or following each course module.

Clear communication

Clear communication is especially important in an online environment. Courses should begin with an orientation or welcome module that will introduce the course and its components. In addition, your students will benefit from weekly announcements and a clear weekly calendar.

Students in a fully online course need to hear from their instructor about how they are doing. Instructors should provide timely feedback to students early on in the course and continue to communicate with students about how they are doing as the course progresses.

A template is now available to guide the creation and navigation of your course structure within Brightspace.

Instructor presence

In an online course, it is especially important to establish and maintain your presence. There are several forms of presence that overlap to inform the students’ educational experience:

Social presence: how you build trusting, inter-personal relationships within your course
Teaching presence: how you facilitate meaningful educational experiences to achieve learning outcomes
Cognitive presence: how you support learners to construct meaning through sustained reflection and discourse), and
Emotional presence: how you facilitate learners’ emotional responses to the learning environment

Supports

In addition to you (and the teaching assistants) providing support within a course, it’s important that students have access to supports related to the rest of their academic experience. These include those related to academics (accessibility, advising, writing), campus communities, research, technology, health/wellness, and more. (A full slate of student supports is integrated into the Brightspace course template.)

Consider providing students a link the Dalhousie Online Learning website, as well as the following areas:

Dalhousie University