Tips for effective online courses

The following are some simple tips that will help you design your online course so that it is more effective no matter the subject.

1. Provide pre-tests or warm-up activities to assess prior knowledge and stimulate interest. You can use the Canvas Quizzes or LTI tools such as Quizlet.
2. Provide questions that you have identified as important to the lesson content and post them in the Module content.
3. Compile course content into Modules including well-written lecture material, quizzes, discussions, presentations, graphics and media when instructionally appropriate.
4. Use clear, strong verbs and nouns in course headings and subheadings to help student locate materials
5. Use bulleted or numbered text whenever possible to avoid dense, text-heavy pages that are difficult to read online. Text-heavy content is better if provided in a printable format for offline reading. Alternate blocks of text and graphics to keep pages visually interesting
6. Visit the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods for ideas and sample graphics
   
   
7. Provide some sort of interaction every 5-10 pages. This could be as simple as a link to an external resource with an interaction or self-test. See these Instructional Strategies from Illinois Online Network for ideas.