1

Our course shells are essentially websites for our courses. Though their use is restricted to registered students, and doesn’t involve much actual web development, they are used by students like websites. This layout can have an impact on the overall quality of the course.[1]

Reflection

The Goal: Creating a Learner-Centred Shell

We are all familiar with the learning outcomes that drive our course content and our assessments. But what is our goal when we are designing the structure of the course?

In a basic sense, the goal of a learning management system is to facilitate the transmission of course content and learning activities. We might say that a successful course structure is one that involves the least time spent finding things, and the most time spent engaging with learning materials. Instructors should aim to create course shells that are clear and easy to navigate.

A recorded lecture, no matter how good, is useless if students can’t find it. A discussion thread is only engaging insofar as students can easily participate in it. As a result, the goal of the LMS is to be learner-centred. We are creating a structure for students, and its success is dependent on how well students are able to find the materials they need, participate in activities, and engage in learning.

How to create a learner-centred course shell?

One thing we can do is put ourselves into our students’ shoes. Pretend that you are the student who is logging in for the first time and navigating your course. Look back at the reflection activity that you’ve just completed, and then take a look at your course. Would your course be enjoyable or frustrating to navigate? Is your course easy to use? Is everything laid out clearly? Would you find everything easily if you were logging in for the first time?

 

Tip: Your LMS should have a “Student View” or similar feature that displays the course from the student’s perspective. This is a great way to evaluate your own course design.

 

Activity: Course Scavenger Hunt

Pick one of your courses (an old course works well), and ensure that all content items and assignments are visible. Turn on Student View and find a partner/friend/child (don’t ask a fellow instructor!) Ask them to navigate through your course. They should have no trouble finding anything, even if they haven’t been in school for years or have never used this LMS. See if they can locate the following items. They are not allowed to ask you any questions.

If you don’t have anyone to ask, enter Student View and try your best to emulate a user entering the course for the first time.

Basics:

  • the course’s schedule
  • the date of the final exam (if applicable)
  • the first assignment: what is it, when is it due, and where can they submit it
  • the instructor’s email
  • the location of the first week’s material (if synchronous, where can they find the virtual classroom; if asynchronous, where are the learning materials)
  • the topic taught in week five

Advanced:

  • the weighting of all assignments
  • the course’s learning outcomes
  • the course’s late marks policy
  • how can they submit their assignments?
  • are quizzes done synchronously as a class, or are they open for a longer period of time?

Feel free to add anything here that is relevant to your course.

How did they do? Was everything easy to find? Was it frustrating? Anything in particular that confused them?

Explore your LMS

Whatever the results of your first analysis of your own course, the sky is not the limit. In reality, we are limited by our LMS. Whether you use Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, D2L, or another course management tool, we as faculty must create our courses within the bounds of our LMS. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. It is important to explore its functionality and limitations. Knowing what you can and can’t do will help you brainstorm realistic design and structural changes to implement.

Tip: Ask your department coordinator or chair to see if you can get an empty course shell without students. This will give you a sandbox area to play with, testing out ideas and structures without interfering with a live course. If you can’t get a course, ask your IT department when students lose access to a course. Once they do, a course from an old semester can be used to test out new ideas.

 

Ease of Navigation

We want our courses to be easy to navigate. We want students to spend as little time as possible looking for material and as much time as possible engaging with the material.

A person in an online class looking at a computer screen and taking notes.
Source: “Student in an online class looking at instructor on computer screen” by freepik.

In 2001, a web designer popularized the idea that good websites should be structured such that everything a user wants can be found within three clicks.[2] This makes sense: we might assume that students would get frustrated if they can’t find what they are looking for. The more clicks it takes, the more likely it is that a student will give up.

We definitely want to avoid frustrated students: students who are angry or anxious are not going to learn well.[3]

However, the three click rule is heavily disputed and has generally been abandoned.[4] This is probably good news, since the restriction would be very onerous for faculty.

This module proposes a different principle: Everything should be easily findable. Don’t make students think about where to find things. Make them think about the course material.

The path to any item (an assignment, video, or discussion board) should be easily understood. We don’t want students to think about where things are. We want that part to be obvious. We want them to save their brain power for engaging with the material, not finding it or trying to figure out what it is. Unsurprisingly, students responded positively to courses that involved minimal time finding specific pieces of information.[5]

Below are a set of tips for faculty to apply in their own courses to make content obvious in its location and its place in a course. Select an item to learn more about it.

Naming Tips for Clarity:

Descriptive Naming
Provide Metadata

Be Consistent

No matter how you organize your course, it should be consistent from week to week. Whatever organizational method you adopt, it should be applied throughout the course. It helps if each week has a similar layout. For example, you could start each week with an introduction and to-do list, then move onto the lectures and activities.

This doesn’t mean that you need to use the same activities each week, but that the general organization of each week should be consistent.

Navigation Tips for Easy Pathways:

Use Course Links

Use the Menu

Consider your Landing Page

A Matter of Balance

We are all familiar with the concept of chunking content to present it in more digestible formats. The idea was popularized in the 1950s by a thinker who concluded that human short-term memory is capped at remembering seven things.[6] However, since then the simple rule of seven has been criticized. Others have suggested four chunks, but reaching any particular number is controversial.[7] Rather, it is more likely that the limit of visual overload and short-term memory retention varies from person to person, task to task. Humans in general might remember fewer rather than more, and prefer smaller groupings, but each individual’s limits are determined by their individual context. Creating balance in your course is important. Put too many things into your menu (in an effort to make everything easily found), and the menu will quickly overwhelm and each individual item will lose its emphasis. Place too few items in the menu and it ceases to have value. You might be able to use dividers, headings, or hierarchy trees in your menu. This will certainly help create structure. You’ll need to explore your LMS to find out what you can and can’t do. The same goes for navigational pathways. Put too many pathways, from everywhere to everywhere, and there is no logic anymore. Finding a balance that works for you and your students takes time and experimentation.

Grouping Tips to Keep Students Focused:

Create Folders or Modules
Embed Content
Linking Out: Websites and Files

Keeping Students on the Same Page

Research has shown that students are more engaged when learning items (readings, assignments, activities, etc.) for a particular week are grouped together visually on a single page.[8] This makes sense — students can get lost quickly if they need to jump around the course shell to complete their assigned tasks.

Introducing Your Structure to Students

Now that you’ve created your course’s structure, you’ll have to introduce this structure to students. Your students may be familiar with navigating other courses using the same LMS, but it’s their first time using your course. You might do things a little differently from other instructors, so it’s important to present an overview of your course. We’ll want to introduce two parts of our course: how to navigate the structure we’ve built in the LMS, alongside how the pieces of the course (activities, readings, lectures) fit together. Introducing the first helps students understand the lay of the land, while introducing the second helps them figure out what they are looking for.

Create a High-Level Course Overview

Give Students a Tour

Key Takeaways

Strive to make courses easily navigable as possible. Three main principles to keep in mind are:

  • Use descriptive names for content and provide metadata
  • Create pathways through the course that make sense from the student’s perspective
  • Group like content together

Activity: Course Scavenger Hunt Revisited

Now that you’ve reviewed some of the principles of course design, take some time to implement a few suggestions that you think would be valuable for your course. Once you have made these changes, ask a different friend/partner/child to review your course, same as the first person did.

If you don’t have anyone to ask, enter Student View and try your best to emulate a user entering the course for the first time.

They are looking for:

Basics:

  • the course’s schedule
  • the date of the final exam (if applicable)
  • the first assignment: what is it, when is it due, where can they complete it
  • the instructor’s email
  • the location of the first week’s material (if synchronous, where can they find the virtual classroom; if asynchronous, where are the learning materials)
  • the topic taught in week five

Advanced:

  • the weighting of all assignments
  • the course’s learning outcomes
  • the course’s late marks policy
  • how can they submit their essays?
  • are quizzes done synchronously as a class, or are they open for a longer period of time?

Was it easier the second time around? Were you able to address any challenges that the first reviewer had?

Additional Resources

  1. "Designing a High-Quality Online Course," California Department of Education. ↵
  2. Zeldman, J. (2001). Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer. Indianapolis: New Riders. ↵
  3. Goleman, D. (2020). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 183. ↵
  4. See: Laubheimer, P. (2019, August 11). The 3-click rule for navigation is false. Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/3-click-rule/, UX myths. (2010, June 1). Myth #2: All pages should be accessible in 3 clicks. UX Myths. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://uxmyths.com/post/654026581/myth-all-pages-should-be-accessible-in-3-clicks and Porter, J. (2016, March 25). Testing the three-click rule. Centre UIE Center. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://articles.uie.com/three_click_rule/ ↵
  5. Troop, M., White, D., Wilson, K. E., & Zeni, P. (2020). The user experience design for learning (UXDL) framework: The undergraduate student perspective. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 11(3), 11-12. https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2020.3.8328 ↵
  6. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63 (2), 81–97. ↵
  7. Cowan, N., Morey, C.C., & Chen, Z. (2007). The legend of the magical number seven. In Sala, S. (Ed.), Tall Tales about the Mind and Brain: Separating fact from fiction (pp. 45-59). Oxford University Press. ↵
  8. Rubin, B., Fernandes, R., Avgerinou, M. D. & Moore, J. (2010). The effect of learning management systems on student and faculty outcomes. (S2). Internet and Higher Education 13, 82–83. ↵

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Designing and Developing High Quality Student-Centred Online/Hybrid Learning Experiences Copyright © by eCampusOntario is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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