### **Course Outline**  ### **Building Your Course Outline** A course outline is an invaluable tool to help you deliver on the solutions you promised to your students. Not sure where to start? Let’s break it down. ### **What Is Your Destination?** The best place to begin is at the *end*. To build a strong course outline, decide on your end goal and work backwards from there. What is the objective of your course? What should students be able to do by the end? Are you teaching them how to paint, cook, or dance the jitterbug? Finally, what skills and knowledge must you impart to get your students to their final destination? ### **Determine Your Steps** When considering these questions, make a list and keep it simple. *Yes, even simpler than that.* Start with the most basic foundation you expect all students will have, and build up from there. Your students aren’t going to be the next Gordon Ramsay before you make sure they know the difference between cast iron and non-stick pans, and no great swing dancer skipped the lesson on tempo. Think of these skills like building blocks: you’ve got to stack them one on top of the other to build a solid structure. Consider starting with an orientation chapter where you introduce everyone to the vocabulary and baseline content you’ll use for the rest of the course. This is helpful for expectation-setting and giving your students a view of the roadmap to come, but it’s also an excellent way of making sure everyone starts off on the same foot. You never know when a student joins your course if they’re familiar with the jargon and shorthand you use on a daily basis; this orientation module is an opportunity to make sure everyone knows the same things and starts the course with the same set of ideas. Keep it simple – no need to reinvent the wheel – but this is important, because it underpins the way students will understand everything else that follows in your course. Once you’ve figured out what building blocks you need, it’s time to put them in order – they will form your course modules or chapters (or whatever you choose to name them!). Organize your steps sequentially, with each one building on the next. This means you should place your easiest content in Module 1, build on it in Module 2, and so on. If possible, you should have some overlap between modules to help students contextualise the information by creating connections to what they learned in the previous section. In education, this is called scaffolding, and it encompasses a variety of instructional techniques to help your students move progressively towards a solid understanding of subject matter, and an ability to apply that knowledge independently to a variety of situations. ### **Make It Stick** For each module, back up your learning content with two things: 1. **Learning resources**. Provide extra readings, infographics, videos, and other educational content across a variety of formats. These create opportunities for your students to absorb information in multiple formats to help them retain knowledge and build context between topics. This also ensures you cater for students who learn differently – some learn through reading, others by listening, others through pictures or infographics. Using the Thinkific course builder, you can add a range of learning materials to your course, including audio, video, multimedia lessons, PDFs, and presentations. By providing a range of learning resources to back up your content, you ensure a diverse [learning experience](https://www.thinkific.com/blog/how-to-create-an-effective-course-outline/) for every student who takes your course. 2. **Practice activities**. We all know practice makes perfect, right? Give your students the opportunity to put their newly-honed skills to the test before you move on to the next batch of new information. Practice activities promote knowledge retention and help students lock skills into place before you teach them something new. You could create a quiz on the course builder, or assign a group conversation exercise on your community site or other online group. It’s important to keep in mind that practice activities are not a test. They’re just a safe space for your students to get their hands dirty and master a particular skill *before* they face a situation where they have to wield these skills independently! You can go old-school with a multiple-choice quiz, or get creative with something out of the box. The sky’s the limit – just give students an opportunity to practice what you taught them! ### **Put It To The Test** Finally, you should incorporate some kind of assessments into your course. It’s easy to add assessments in your course using the assignment and Brillium Exam tools in the course builder, but you don’t necessarily have to do one assessment per module. You might do one assessment every module, or every two or three modules, or you might even do one big assessment or wrap-up project right at the end. Let your assessment schedule be guided by the content of your course. This might be an assignment they turn in, or a more in-depth quiz, or a cornerstone project – it’s up to you and your course material! Space out assessments regularly throughout the course, and consider basing them around key skill groups or themes. A good guideline for assessments is to ask “if they haven’t mastered the info from Modules 1-3, are they likely to succeed in Module 4?” If the answer is a hard no, you should set an assessment activity between Module 3 and 4 so that students have an opportunity to check their own learning and have a chance to course-correct or review before diving in the deep end with new information – otherwise it’s a little like trying to learn multiplication before you’ve mastered addition! When planning your assessments, make sure to include some information from previous modules. A quiz is a good way to practice skills from *one* module, but you also need larger assessments where students test themselves on a broader range of knowledge and have the opportunity to combine and contextualize module-specific knowledge before moving forward. Template of Course Outline: [Outlining-Your-Online-Course-Guide.pdf](file-guid:03d61c62-2772-43f4-a35a-5d21dbb71cc2) \ \  **Author:** [Professor_Demo](mention:58246843-4104-4176-9e6b-ab5ef705bb67 "/u/professor_demo/") > ###### [Members](https://better2morrow.org/content/perma?id=1947) can leave comments below if there are questions or suggestions about the content above.