Planning Sustainable Course Design: the Seven Step Model
It can be very tempting to begin creating an online course within a VLE by uploading a variety of content resources for your students. After all, you probably have a clear idea about the content you want to use, but may be less certain of course designs or activities. However, the most effective and time efficient approach to course design is to draft your design on paper first. The following seven-step model can be used as a framework to help you plan learning activities for your students, explore how you will integrate these activities with learning resource materials, and reflect upon how you can effectively offer feedback to your students.
Advantages to planning course design using the seven-step-model
There are several advantages to this approach to planning course design:
By basing course design around student tasks or activities, emphasis is focussed around learner interaction.
Within each student learning activity the role of the tutor and of each student should be clearly outlined.
The storyboards document learning designs that can be reused. A good example of a learning design is a role-playing activity. According to Oliver and McLoughlan (2003) this sort of activity 'represents a planned and coordinated set of tasks within a setting, the process of which will cause conceptual change among the learners. The levels and forms of conceptual change will depend very much on the background of the learners, their roles and responsibilities within the activity and the forms of collaboration, articulation, reflection and self-regulation involved.' The design of this activity can be reused across different learning and teaching contexts by substituting the activity and content resources.
When updating a course, individual resources or activities can be easily substituted.
Storyboards can help plan support for students with special needs.
Students find it helpful to know the learning objectives that specify what they will learn and what they will be able to do if successful learning has taken place (Frederikson et al, 2005)
This approach to course design can also be used to plan face-to-face courses. It simply provides you with a means of planning the integration of a series of activities and how to review student communication and feedback.
