During online course development, faculty collaborate closely with a DLINQ Instructional Designer to design and create their online course. Instructional Designers bring expertise in digital pedagogy and course design; collaborating with an instructional designer ensures that it provides a consistent experience for students in line with the program consistency items, and that it adheres to accessibility standards, principles of inclusive design, and standards of research-based online learning design. The course development partnership is an opportunity to re-envision courses so that they can live their best lives as online, asynchronous courses within their programs.
Key Elements of the Course Development Process
Course development typically unfolds over a 3-4 month process. Our typical course development windows are September-December, January-mid-May, and mid-May-mid-August. The process may be slightly different for each ID and faculty pair. But here are some general milestones:
- Kick off meeting: the first meeting between ID and faculty involves dreamscaping the course and developing a Project Charter that’s used to set out roles and responsibilities, timelines and milestones, and ways of working together.
- Developing the course map: The ID and faculty work together to develop a course map that sets out the course topic outline and details about learning activities, assignments, materials, etc. If the course has been taught before the syllabus is usually a good starting point for this step.
- Developing the course shell: The course map is used by the ID to create the Canvas course shell, which will be a skeletal version of the learning space that includes an overarching structure, design, layout, navigation, and placeholder content.
- Gathering and creating content: The faculty member gathers and/or creates content, including multimedia content such as videos, and library reserves. The ID will work with the faculty to ensure that materials meet accessibility requirements (e.g., video captioning).
- Adding content to the course shell: The faculty member adds content and/or adapts (placeholder) content provided by the ID in the course shell.
- Developing a course communication plan: The ID and faculty work together to design a communication plan that details when and how the instructor will interact with the students. We believe in intentionally building instructor social presence into courses to boost student engagement.
- QA: Once the Canvas course is finalized, the ID will perform a series of final quality assurance checks to ensure a smooth roll out.
The expected deliverable at the end of this process is a fully developed course that is ready to teach. A fully developed course includes the following components:
- Finished course map (contains mapping of competencies and learning objectives, assessments, sequence of learning activities for all weeks of the course)
- Fully developed Canvas site, using the designated program template, corresponding to the course map. This includes a finalized syllabus; for all modules, all content (readings/videos/etc.), activities/assignments, instructions, due dates, grading categories, and points.
- Full quality assurance process including captions and transcripts, link validator, and UDOIT report/remediation.
For more details about the online course development process, please read the Faculty Guide to Developing Online Courses With DLINQ.
Resources for Online Course Development
These resources provide detailed information about processes, timelines, deliverables, and expectations for online course development, as well as information and examples for creating online courses that embody DLINQ’s design values.
