Course Structure & Navigation

Learning objectives for this lesson:

identify the importance of course structure to online learning students

identify the rules of defining online course structure

contrast a few course structure models

Course Structure and Distance Learning

Course structure refers to the organization of the course content and occasionally your course schedule. Course structure for online learning is particularly important to online learners because getting lost within the site is one of the most common causes of frustration in online learning. The reason is two fold.

First, as discussed in the Student-Centered Learning Environment lesson, student learning in an online environment requires students to be self-motivated, self-directed, and self-disciplined. In such a learning environment where students have to take active control of their learning, they can easily feel discouraged if they remain unfamiliar with the organization of your course content and activities, which are usually indicated in your course structure and the navigation of the course site.

Second, since distance students do not have regular class meetings to ask their instructors or their peers for clarifications, they would either bombard you with e-mails or they would simply withdraw from the class.

With this understanding, the rule of thumb in an online course design is to make your course structure clear and straightforward. Here are a few suggestions.

1. The course structure needs to be logical and consistent. In other words, it needs to reflect some natural order within the content.
2. Where possible, categorize the course assignments into groups such as class discussion, quizzes, projects, reading materials, or videos.
3. Familiarize your students with where everything is located in the course site. For example, do all the videos go under one specific course folder or do they go separately under each chapter?
4. Provide your students with a detailed description of course structure. For example:

This course is made up of sections.
Each section is divided into topics organized in a hierarchical structure.
Each topic consists of two HTML documents
1). one with the main concepts introduced by the topic
- similar to the contents of an overhead in a class
- may contain: keywords, bulleted items, diagrams, and pictures
2). one with a detailed discussion of these concepts
- usually contains what the instructor would say about each overhead
- presented as a set of text paragraphs

How to lay out your course structure?

There are different ways to lay out your course structure before uploading your documents to a Course Management System (CMS) such as Blackboard or WebCT. The following are a few prototypes that can easily be adapted to your online course. These prototypes are individually distinctive, but they are not mutually exclusive.

Model 1: Unit by Unit

Model 2: Module by Module (Chapter by Chapter, etc.)

Model 3: Week by Week

Model 4: Project by Project