1. Overview


Design is important as a "teacher who doesn’t have a sense of design as a process, and who doesn’t have the conceptual tools and skills to work through a design problem in a creative but structured way, will be likely to jump straight to a solution" (Goodyear, 2005).

As more universities are moving to online teaching, designs that help teachers to plan, implement and focus on student online learning experiences are crucial (Agostinho, Lockyer & Bennett, 2018; Allen & Seaman, 2013). In this topic you will be introduced to new online teaching pedagogies. 

Learning outcome: At the end of this topic you should be able to plan a learner-centred course.

It is highly likely that you are involved in designing an online course and you have already begun to think about the possible learning outcomes, activities and assessments. To plan a learner-centred online course, we introduce a useful online learning approach (Community of Practice), followed by a  practical framework (the Course design plan) that can be applied to your own course design.

This topic covers:

  • the Community of Inquiry framework and the Course design plan
  • how students learn online
  • how teachers design their teaching presence, and
  • how to avoid online design pitfalls.

We open this topic by considering a theoretical approach to online design.