Introduction:

This course gives you a swift introduction to the necessary elements of online courses: identifying materials, building activities and interaction, and designing assessments for the online environment. To identify materials, of course, you need to have a course in mind. For the purposes of this professional development course and its exercises, you can use an existing (present, past, or future) course.

Resources and Activites in Moodle

Moodle divides the content we add into two categories: Resources and Activities. The IDS Template you might be using in your course also divides materials this way. This is meant to highlight the difference between resources (things we learn with and from) and activities (things we interact with and practice on). Put more succinctly:

  • Activities require action from the learner, whether it's minor (clicking the right answer to a question) or substantial (making a video, chatting with a group member, posting to a forum).
  • Resources are usually static -- things to read or view.

One other good thing to know: In Moodle, activities can be assigned a grade; resources cannot.

Learner Expectations:

This module is also built for asynchronous participation, meaning you can complete the online pieces at any time. We estimate that completing the readings and activity in this module will take approximately 2.5  hours. 

Read and explore the following learning materials.

Module Completion:

To complete this module, the following activities must be finished with a score of "pass" or "complete":


OSCQR Standards related to this overview:

The Online SUNY Course Quality Review Rubric that we use in Academic Technology has an entire section on the importance of choosing content and activities that support learning. Perhaps most critical to our work are these three standards:

Each of these standards points to the idea that an online experience is not an experience just moved online: what students are doing when they're away from the computer, whether reading, listening, or acting on what they're learning matters. Just as face-to-face courses assume students will work and learn outside of the classroom, so, too, will an online or hybrid course.


Last modified: Monday, 18 April 2022, 3:02 PM