Designing an online course: setting aims and objectives

   

    In this blog post, I will share my insights on the process of designing a short online course on LMS Google classroom. As I have mentioned in my previous blog posts, I am familiar with the structure of Google classroom courses since the times when I had classes for the module named "ICT in education" at Uzbek State World Languages University. However, I have always been in the position of a learner, taking the course and completing assignments to reach my goals. I have never imagined how difficult it would be being in a position of a creator, designing an online English course for any level of learners. There are a few nuances about the beginning of the online course design process that I would want to share here.

    The first point to consider while designing an online course is the topic selection. The target audience for this course are intermediate (B1) level English language learners. Hence, I initially planned to create a course on building communication skills for intermediate (B1) level learners. However, considering the requirements of this assignment that allow us to create an at least 6-hour online course, I decided to focus on a more narrow topic so that the students taking the course would gain practical experience targeted at one skill area, which would provide depth of information rather than just getting the general idea of concepts. After careful consideration, I chose "Mastering Everyday English Writing" as a topic for my course. Another point to take into account is that a well-organized online course has clear and specific aims and objectives (Jaggars and Xu, 2016). Hence, I believe that the following aims and objectives can be identified:

    The aim of this course is to improve intermediate level learners' writing clarity, fluency and tone.

    By the end of this course, the students will be able to:

• write professional and personal emails;
• write informal messages for everyday situations;
• create engaging social media posts using appropriate language;
• write short stories and personal narratives using experssions;
• understand and apply tone in different contexts.

    Meanwhile, as we can see from the objectives of this online course, there is a lot of information to cover for learners. Therefore, another decision was made to make the course manageable and improve student retention rates. Each lesson was divided into two milestone points so the students would not feel overwhelmed and keep on completing the tasks (Stavredes and Herder, 2014). For instance, the first lesson will take 1.5 hours to complete and I will separate it into two parts: "lesson 1.1 - Email structure" and "lesson 1.2 - Writing professional and personal emails". Additionally, I plan on including a lot of interactive tasks to keep learners engaged through the process (Chakraborty and Muyia Nafukho, 2014).

    As I move forward with the process of designing the first online course on my own, the next blog post under the label "Online course design" will include the course rationale and teaching context. I also plan to demonstrate the structure of this online course. Stay tuned for more updates!

reflection of my state

References

Chakraborty, M. and Muyia Nafukho, F., (2014). Strengthening student engagement: what do students want in online courses?. European Journal of Training and Development, 38(9), pp.782-802.

Jaggars, S.S. and Xu, D., (2016). How do online course design features influence student performance?. Computers & Education, 95, pp.270-284.

Stavredes, T. and Herder, T., (2014). A guide to online course design: Strategies for student success. John Wiley & Sons.