Phase 3 Organizing Instruction

Overview

A good way to start thinking through your learning experiences is to decide how you want to organize your course. Now that you have developed your course goals, objectives, and begun planning your assessments, you can begin thinking about how you will define your course structure. Courses are often organized into instructional units or modules. These can be organized by topics, by units of time (weeks, months, etc.), or in another manner that is appropriate for your course.

example of unit organization

An instructional unit is typically comprised of a variety of learning experiences that are designed to help students meet a specific course objective or set of objectives. Lectures (video or live lecture), readings, assignments, and assessments all make up pieces of instructional units. As you develop your instructional units, make sure you can articulate which course objective/s each unit is designed to address. This is a critical step in the backward design process as it helps ensure alignment between what your students will do and the goals/objectives you have set for the course.

Organization in Canvas Courses

If you are teaching an online course in Canvas, planning for course organization takes on even more importance. Since your Canvas course is usually the primary way your students interact with course content and complete course assignments, it's important to try to maintain a consistent and logical course structure. Here are a few tips for planning your Canvas course organization:

A logical course structure supports effective and efficient student learning. Decide how grouped materials will be presented (modules, units, weekly, by topic, by assignments or by activities, etc.). For example, in some courses, the materials are presented in modules and each module represents a week. Each module also follows a similar organization and can include the following types of materials:
- Overview- includes weekly objectives
- Read- describes pedagogical knowledge and offers practical strategies
- Watch- contains videos of instructors sharing their experience teaching online courses
- Apply - an opportunity for participants to use their new pedagogical skills toward the development of their own class
- Discuss - an opportunity to get feedback from peers on newly developed course materials
- Build - an opportunity for participants to gain experience in a learning management system with their new course materials.
Use only the essential course tools in the course navigation menu(the how-to videos in this module will show you how to edit the course navigation menu). Remove student access to course tools in the course navigation menu that are not being used. For example, we removed the collaborations and outcomes tools in this course, because we are not going to use them. Try to keep coursework and activities in Canvas, rather than spreading work across multiple platforms. There is no single best structure for your course organization. Each course is unique and each instructor is unique. The best advice is to develop a consistent and manageable format for your students.
Keep the same rhythm for assignment due dates and communication with your students. In this institute, for example, we were following this rhythm:
- Monday:
  - 12:00 am: Instructor opens the weekly module
  - 12:00 pm: Instructor sends weekly announcements
  - 11:59 pm: Instructor post grades and feedback
- Wednesday:
  - 6:00 pm: Instructor sends reminders to complete weekly assignments (I am sending reminders because it is easy to forget about assessments in an online course)
- Thursday:
  - 11:59 pm: First discussion due (Thursday deadlines will give group members some time for fruitful discussions with their peers before the end of the week)
- Sunday:
  - 11:59 pm: Week ends - complete all weekly assignments.

Pause and Reflect

Now it's time to start brainstorming how you want to organize your course and what types of learning experiences your students will have as they progress through the course units. Some instructors find it helpful to take some time now to read back over and reflect on their course objectives. This serves as a quick reminder of what it is that you want your students to accomplish. After that, it's time to start thinking about how you will help them accomplish it. Consider the following as you plan your course organization and learning experiences:

How do you want to organize your instructional units? By time? By topic?
What objective/s will you try to accomplish in each of your instructional units? (remember that objectives can span multiple units)
What type of content (readings, videos, etc.) and/or lecture material will your students need to help them achieve the objective/s for each unit?
What activities will students complete in each unit?
How will you assess student progress in each unit?
Is there any supplemental content you wish to provide to help students?

You may find it helpful to utilize this Module Template as you plan and organize your course units. If you decide to use this, you may want to share copies of these overview pages with your students to help them keep track of everything they need to complete as well as gain a better understanding of how each unit of your course connects to your course objectives. At the very least, these module template pages can serve as a brainstorming and organizing tool to help you plan your course and ensure that everything you plan connects back to your course objectives.

Take some time to brainstorm and write down some ideas. You can organize your instructional units using the visual course planning template or course planning spreadsheet.

Once you're done with this self-paced portion of the workshop, be sure you check out the next page for the dates and times for future synchronous peer review sessions. In these sessions, you will have the opportunity to share the material that you created here, get feedback, and ask questions.