Online Teaching

Organizing and Sequencing Content


Organizing Content

Weekly modules are the best way to curate your course content through Brightspace. This minimizes student confusion and facilitates course alignment. Here are steps to organize your course content:

  • Consult your course syllabus. Most likely you’ve already organized your content into weekly themes. Each week of content in your syllabus can represent a module.
  • Consider which materials are required to complete each module including content videos, readings, learning activities, and assessment.
  • In order to organize your content simply and consistently, begin by creating one weekly module. Once you're satisfied with how the content is organized, copy that weekly module to create your other modules. This way you can avoid inconsistency.
  • As you revise your course, consider the weekly module student workload distribution. Are there some modules that require students to spend hours reading materials, watching videos, and completing assessments, while other modules are very sparse?
  • Clearly label your activities (course videos, learning activities, assessments, etc.) and make sure students can easily differentiate between required and recommended activities.
  • Ensure navigation of your Brightspace site is easy and simple so students can avoid excessive clicking.

Weekly Sequence

Planning out what students will do during a week requires a shift in thinking about courses as organized into class sessions (e.g., Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) to a modular setup typical of asynchronous online courses.

When creating a module for a week, try breaking it up sequentially in a way that will help students meet the week’s learning outcomes, providing clear directions to students of what is expected of them. An example module might include:

Step 1. Ask students to use a course Padlet to post an image that represents their experience with the module topic.

Step 2. Provide a short 15-minute lecture video and at the end prompt learners to complete a short 3-4 question knowledge acquisition quiz.

Step 3. To provide more content for the week’s topic, incorporate a news article, blog, video, or podcast for students.

Step 4. Ask students to use the discussion board to complete a post responding to a question related to the week’s topic.

Step 5. Provide a short 15-minute lecture video and at the end prompt learners to complete a short 3-4 question knowledge acquisition quiz.

Step 6. Incorporate a Chapter reading from a course text.

Step 7. Provide a short 15-minute lecture video and at the end of the video prompt learners to complete a short 3-4 question knowledge acquisition quiz.

Step 8. Require students to return to the course Padlet and review what’s posted. Then ask them to submit a short paragraph reflection comparing/contrasting the images.

You can swap the steps with different forms of engagement and content for each module. Creating steps in your module can help you manage the course and encourage students’ engagement with you, the content, and their peers. This also creates a standard layout or module progression for your students to experience throughout the course.