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Once you've planned your course, you'll need help to begin working on its design.
Designing a short course is a process and support is available for each stage. In the Planning section you have seen that this journey begins with completion of a Course Initiation Questionnaire (CIQ), a structured document which takes you through the most important considerations of designing a short course.
If you are developing a blended or online short course you should have an introductory meeting with a member of the Online Learning team to explore your ideas and the design process. If you are working on your CIQ you can contact the team to request a meeting. If your CIQ has already received approval, the team will contact you directly.
Moving from planning to design
In an initial conversation with us you will have the opportunity to discuss how your learners, you as an educator, and your department will benefit from delivering a short course. We will work with you to clarify its high level aims and objectives and their influence on subsequent design and platform choices, alongside what will be possible with the time and resources you have available and the support we can provide.
Supported development
Once your CIQ receives approval, elements of the introductory meeting may then be taken further in an ABC Design Workshop, in which you are introduced to short course design pedagogy. In this hands-on session you will start to create learning activities and assessments from your high level aims and objectives. You will work with a Learning Designer to produce a storyboard for a week or topic from your course that utilises an appropriate balance of the six learning types, a concept we will explore more in subsequent articles.
Self-service guidance
If you don’t take part in an ABC workshop you will be referred to the UCL Learning Designer, a tool created by the Institute of Education and maintained by ISD Digital Education. The self-service tool is based on the same theory as the ABC workshop and helps you to make decisions around how to design your course structure and activities and produce a high-level storyboard.
Design standards and templates
For both approaches you will also be supplied with information around expected design standards and recommended templating tools.
The Connected Learning Baseline is a UCL framework outlining the basic design standards that any online component of your course should meet. The Baseline also forms the foundation of the quality assurance review for your short course.
An online course space will be set up using an editable template comprising of a Baseline-compliant structure, resource placeholders, and sample instructional text. This can serve as a starting point for the development of a new course or the rebuild of an existing one. You may also make use of simple project management templates we supply as well as examples of finished courses to see what your course might look like.
Further support
The subsequent pages cover the basics of how to approach course design. The Online Learning team can provide more detailed guidance and support for the design process, and also offer live training opportunities on how to design and deliver effective synchronous and asynchronous learning, engage students in online sessions, and structure video lectures.
To find out more and speak to a Learning Designer, please contact the UCL Online Learning team at extend@ucl.ac.uk.