brown fountain pen on notebook When designing any course, backwards design and careful consideration of alignment will lead to a more effective, streamlined and engaging course. Early investments in these practices may also lead to less work later on for you in both planning and running your course.

Backwards design means that you start with the end: "What do I want students to know, understand or be able to do at the end of this course?" and work backwards from there. To learn more about this aspect of online course design, visit our New Course Design course.

Alignment is what happens in a course when activities, assessments, and course outcomes are all aligned. For example, outcomes describe what we hope students will learn, assessment measure whether that is happening, and activities prepare students for those assessments and outcomes.

Note: we are distinguishing here between designing (i.e. planning) your online course and actually building it in Canvas. To learn more about building in Canvas, please visit our Module Build your knowledge: Canvas.

Next, think through the types of interactions that will happen during your course

A major question for many of us when changing from in-person to online course design is, "how much work should students be doing?" Clear outcomes become very helpful here, because they help us change the question. Instead of asking, "Are they doing enough?" we can shift to: "Are the activities supporting this week's outcomes? Are they preparing them for an assessment or key course outcomes?" This question helps us tailor the weekly work to what is needed to reach learning goals.

The next important shift is to thinking in weeks. For those shifting from in-person to online learning, our first instinct may be to recreate all in-person activities. However, as we get more confident with designing for, we can start planning for a week holistically, thinking, "what do I want them to learn this week?" and "what activities and types of interaction will help them get there?" As you do, you'll should consider the types of interactions you want them to have, including student-content (like readings), student-student (like discussions), or student-teacher (like conferences or feedback).

As you think through your weekly plan, consider how activities in live classes and asynchronous activities can compliment each other. Use this chart to think about how you might choose activities for independent (AKA asynchronous) and live (AKA synchronous) aspects of your week (chart adapted from work by Eric Hudson).

Asynchronous (on-demand)	Synchronous (Live)
Best for individualized work	Best for collaborative work
Absorbing information at your own pace	Student presentations
Deep work, diving deeper into a topic	Social, personal connection
Practice - at your own pace	Live Q&A
Individualized or self-selected topics	Conferencing, checking in
Slow chats	Live discussions

What do these course activities look like in practice? In this model, students might start the week watching a series of mini-lectures on their own time, doing individualized practice activities and then coming to class. The live session could then build on that work, for example doing practice work in a group, working on a collaborative project, or using a live demonstration or discussion to dive deeper into a topic. The live session then prepares students to go back and do more individual work.

One result of this kind of planning is that you may end up shifting some activities (like absorbing information via lecture) to asynchronous time. There are benefits to having students learn independently (think homework!), and drawbacks to long, exhausting live sessions.

See below for an example of a week's worth of work in writing course taught in a blended modality, with several different types of activities reinforcing course-level and more granular outcomes.

Example: Critical Reading and Writing, Week 4

Course-level outcomes: students will be able to integrate the ideas of others into their writing, students will use external sources in support of a thesis. This week's outcome: students will be able to compare and contrast ideas presented by different authors.

Weekly Synchronous/Asynchronous Interactions and Activities:

Student-Content: reading students will read and annotate the second and third articles from our "Optional Ethnicities" reading set before Wednesday.
Student-Student: discussion board Students choose and share one quote that stood out to them from the two articles as particularly helpful for their essay, and explain why in a discussion board by Wednesday. By Sunday they should respond to a classmate with an agreement/addition, disagreement, or a question. This will be graded complete/incomplete.
Student-Content: lecture Students will watch a 5 minute video on comma use and take our low-stakes commas quiz.
Student-Student/Student-Instructor: live class In our live class on Thursday, students will come in with a chosen post from the discussion board that they want to respond to (agree/disagree/question) to start the discussion. Then, students will choose breakout groups based on which reading they want to discuss. Each group will compare and contrast a quotation from their chosen article with a quote from the base essay, "Optional Ethnicities." Finally, groups will compete in a "comma contest."
Student-Content/Student-Instructor: assessment Students write 1-2 pages comparing or contrasting quotes from two of the three articles we've read so far, and explaining how this comparison or contrast will help them in their essay. Due Sunday; instructor will provide feedback 1 week after submission. This will be graded complete/incomplete.

As you can see, students work in a variety of modes over the course of a week, interacting with the material, the instructor and each other, with each activity in service of the unit and course goals. In a different course (say, biology), the content interaction could look different (perhaps students would read a textbook, critique a scientific article, or watch a lecture), but the thinking about activities and types of interactions would still apply.

For more on strategies to engage students in live sessions, see...

Teaching your Synchronous and Blended Online Course (in this Module)

Enlivening Live Sessions: Tools and More!

Encouraging participation in Zoom

Teaching with Groups: Using Breakouts to Engage Students

Return to Teaching in Different Modalities Module.