Setting up the structure

Structuring your course

It's essential that your course is a structured, engaging experience that helps your learners to understand what they’re learning and retain it. Although much of the guidance in The Open University’s learning design team’s blog is intended for academic authors creating OU courses, you may find some of the resources useful (including those linked to below).

Your course should be built using the following principles:

• Learning outcomes: What your learners should be able to do by the end of your course.
• Assessment: How you’re going to tell they can do it.
• Learning activities: What do your learners need to do in order to get there? 

You may find it useful to consider a series of questions related to planning your learners’ journey as you create your course.

Among the design challenges that you face, you need to consider how you will:

• support your learners’ sense of belonging to a community
• encourage interactive learning
• align your learning outcomes with the skills required for success
• support your learners with different career aspirations/different roles
• ensure you meet the needs of any of your learners who have different requirements. 

A quick guide with prompts relating to the learning design team’s ICEBERG principles is useful to think about how to create a course that keeps learners engaged.

You can also ensure variety in the tasks that you’re asking your learners do by referring to a framework of different activity types. 

You may find it useful to look at the learning design framework in Gráinne Conole’s academic article ‘The 7Cs of learning design – a new approach to rethinking design practice’.