Topic outline

  • General

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    • And so, ‘tis the season!

      The firelogs are crackling, the chill has fallen upon us and the marshmallows are poised and ready for the toasting! And to commemorate the start of the festive winter season, we decided to bestow you all with the best gift there is - the gift of knowledge! Course design knowledge, to be precise.

      Starting today and up until the 16th of December, our e-Learning experts at Catalyst EU will be sharing 12 top tips to refresh your course design. How to keep your content organised and up to date, fostering collaborative learning, helping your students to stay engaged and on-track, and much, much more!

      Each day we will reveal the next step on how to enhance your course, so make sure to check back every day, and please do share your work - the more the merrier! And if you have any questions please reach out using the #12DaysOfCatalyst hashtag on Twitter or LinkedIn; we’ll be more than happy to help you with your course design needs.

  • Day 1

    • Review previous run of course/module

      As teachers and trainers, its good to reflect on past iterations of our courses; what went well, what didn't, what our learners struggled with and what they excelled at.

      There are a number of tools in our LMS arsenal that can help with it.


      Feedback

      Does your course/module offer opportunities to ask for feedback? If you're an university, you may have had it centrally collected via a tool external to your LMS, and if you're a training provider, you may have used the Feedback tool in our courses to ask your learners how it went. Do take the time to review the comments, as this will help you when setting up your course for the next run. 

      Something else you can do is to place Choice activities after each topic to ask your learners how they feel. This can then be followed up by a 'one question' feedback activity where learners can add comments if they wish to.


      Reports

      Do you know all the different types of report available to you in your course? If you have activity completion switched on you can review the Activity Completion report to see who has completed each task. Some reports to review:

      • Activity completion - you can see who's done what
      • Course completion - this is a great one: have activity completion on for most of the activities, but only include the required activities in the course completion settings. Make sure you add the course completion block to your page!
      • Activity report - this shows you how many times an activity or resource was accessed. If you gave your learners a choice of watching, reading or listening to content, you can work out which was the most popular format of delivery.


      Grades

      In your quizzes and assignments you can view the reports to get a snapshot of how successful your learners were. You can see the spread of grades as well as how often learners got a specific question wrong. Perhaps it's because it wasn't worded very well, or that they found it too difficult to answer. Could providing additional resources around the question topic help? All things to consider when reviewing your course.


      Importing past course content

      Once you have reviewed your course, decide on what you want to roll over into the next version of the course.
      Moodle and Totara use the same mechanism for this, where you can choose which activities and resources to import into your course. Only bring what you need to, bearing in mind you can always edit it in the course page before making the course live for learners.



      Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator

  • Day 2

    • Review site version - any updates or new features?

      Moodle and Totara are constantly changing for the best! The communities are frequently coming together suggesting features and reporting bugs, and so it's important to stay up to date with what's available.

      It could be that your LMS has had an upgrade since you last used it or since the last time your course ran. When (re)building your course you should try and find some CPD time to see what's new and now available to you - you never know, a feature that you've been longing for might now be in your version!

      Below you can find some resources on the latest versions of Moodle, Totara and Mahara. Your own eLearning platform support team should keep you in the loop every time a new version of your platform is on the horizon, but you can also independently keep up with news by participating in forums, reading blogs and attending webinars!



      Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator, and Lya Gobetti, eLearning Consultant.

  • Day 3

    • (Re)Structure your course online

    • You've now made sure that your site is technically up to date and you've considered the feedback previous users have given you. But what actions need to come out of that feedback?

      Many of us are restrained in our changes to course content from year to year, due to curriculum constraints, external qualification bodies, or validation processes. But, whether within those constraints, or being able to change some of those alongside an annual course review, ensuring that your course or programme continues to meet those requirements and your learners' needs is an important step - I'm sure we can all remember the acetate overheads in lectures we've attended as students ourselves, sometimes dated ten years back if not more!


      Things to check:
      • If we're resetting the curriculum, what are our learning aims and objectives?
      • Can we reconsider the assessments being used?
      • Can we make use of Constructive Alignment to support any course redesign?
      • Are there new tools available from an upgraded Moodle/Totara version, or even new plugins?
      • Is there a paradigm shift to be considered, like Face to face -> Hybrid -> Online or vice versa?


      Image source: Radboud Universiteit


      Using Feedback

      With curriculum and technical changes considered, we need to look at any actions noted from any user feedback within the existing curriculum.

      • Does content need to be clarified?
      • Have you amended dates on assignment submissions or events in the learning calendar?
      • Was any particular content heavily used, or alternatively lightly/not used - does it add anything to the course materials?
      • Are newer resources available, whether is image or video links within the content or in the reading lists?

      Much of this is obvious to course leaders in corporate training, FE or HE when materials are reviewed for face to face delivery. Online or blended delivery is no different in the need to ensure the content is refreshed and updated.


      Proofing/Piloting

      Whether it's a brand new course, or reworking an existing one, consider having someone else pilot or at least proof read through the course.

      This should ideally be someone with sufficient domain knowledge to identify any issues with the content, but possibly not a direct colleague who may not spot issues with assumptions of knowledge and terminology, as they may have exactly the same assumptions. In a University, a good idea is to set up a 'proof exchange' with staff in a related but separate course or field within the same school or department.



      Suggested by Richard Oelmann, Head of Business Development

  • Day 4

    • Check links and resources are up to date

      Every time you have a course that you know learners will soon be accessing again, it’s important to look through the resources within the course as if you were doing it for the first time.

      Very often URLs, links and references you added a year prior may cease to exist, their reference may change, and so on so forth. Reviewing the course content before renewing it guarantees users will not find any hurdles when going through the course you created for the first time.

      404 page from Disney.com

      Image source: https://www.pedalo.co.uk/awesome-404-error-pages/


      Things to check:

      • URLs - check that the destination website is still active and relevant. This can often be true of links to PDFs as well.

      • Library resources - often resources used from the library have their own licence. Double check that you still have permission to share them.

      • External media - this goes for videos (such as those on YouTube or Vimeo) or links to podcasts. Make sure that embedded content is displayed correctly and that it hasn't been removed from its source page.

      • External tools - do they need to be reconfigured? Have you discovered a better tool in the time since you first implemented the tool?

      • Open Content - do you still have permission to use the content in your course? Has the Creative Common licence changed?


      Suggested by Lya Gobetti, eLearning Consultant 

  • Day 5

    • Identify collaborative tasks 

      When reviewing your content from the previous year, or when designing activities from scratch, look for opportunities where you could organise your learners into smaller groups to solve a problem. Or perhaps, maybe you’d could bring the whole group together to build their own resource.

      Either way, Moodle and Totara have great tools to facilitate both!

      • Creation of groups - manually or randomly.
        You can use the groups feature within your course and use these groups alongside many of the activities. You can add people yourself, you can tell the LMS to randomly place them, or your learners can even sign up to groups using the choice tool.

        When setting activities to 'group mode' you can choose to keep the visibility to just that group only by selecting 'separate groups', (so group A can only see what others in group A are doing, but can't see progress or content from group B). Changing it to 'visible groups' means that all learners can choose which groups to view, but can't actively participate in them unless they are in them.

        You can also use groups for reporting on progress, group by group. For this to work you need to make sure 'Group mode' is configured to 'on' in the course settings.

        For how to best utilise groups, check out the Moodle groups advice page and the Totara groups advice page for some amazing advice on how to best take advantage of this tool.



      Key collaborative tools:
      • Wiki - whole class, groups, individual
        The wiki tool can be a great place to curate ideas, record progress or demonstrate outcomes from tasks and research. Maybe you could pick a learner per week to write up and share the notes from each live session?

      • Glossary - create a library of curated content
        Ask your learners to contribute links to resources based around a particular topic, such as useful journals to use as part of their reference list.

      • Database - again, use this to get students to actively contribute content, but with defined fields.
        This tool is a bit like creating a form for them to fill out. This could be a great activity to get your learners out and about and filling it in (on their mobile devices) with observations, and uploading photos.

      • Forums - general chit chat to scholarly discussions; these can also be graded if using Moodle.
        Some teachers/trainers like to have separate forums for each topic to keep the class focused in one area. Others like to have just one for the whole course. Another option is to use it as part of an activity, such as requiring a 500 summary of a specific book chapter. You can set activity completion so that all participants must post one discussion and at least three replies. Moodle: Ideas for forums

      • Assignments - group work is a skill many need to hone. It can also cut down on time needed to grade.
        Did you know you can configure the Assignment tool so that groups can submit work and receive the same grade and feedback? Great for tasks that need separate contributions, or perhaps a group submission from a Mahara group portfolio. Moodle has a good guide for using the assignment tool.



      Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator

  • Day 6

    • Identify self assessment/reflection tasks

      As a former lecturer myself, I often worried about how my learners were doing. Did they understand my taught session? Did they understand the assigned reading? Did they get what I wanted them to get from a practical task? Luckily Totara and Moodle have many built in tools to help both the learner and the teachers/trainers keep track on progress.

      During lockdown, many lecturers expressed concerns that they were 'over assessing' and sometimes even tripling their workload by giving weekly assignment tasks that they had to grade. My advice - flip it around - let your LMS do the quick feedback for you!

      Having multiple points during a course for learners to 'check-in' and see how they're doing will really help them when it comes to the assessed tasks that do count towards their final grade. I came across the video below many years ago and it still rings true now:

      Analogy between education and chicken feeding


      In summary - don't wait to the end to see if your learners have understood the material; it could be too late to do anything.

      Tools for your consideration:

      • Quizzes
        - did you know you can create a bank of questions and pull them into a quiz at random?
        Find out about questions banks (Totara and Moodle)

      • Feedback tool
        - ask your learners to self reflect and respond to open-ended questions. Once complete you can present model answers. Using the feedback tool you won't need to give them a grade.

      • H5P
        - so many options available to you for creating quizzes and activities (see some examples here). Here's a simple one that took 2 mins to set up:


      With H5P you have a number of options for use:


      'Keeping tabs'
      Make the time to monitor how your learners are doing by reviewing the reports and activity completion progress. Is there one activity that your learners struggled with as a group? Would organising a quick 20min seminar help clear up any confusion? Maybe include a forum for learners to post where they felt unsure and have their peers help them.

      So many options!


      Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator

  • Day 7

    • Identify portfolio tasks

      Portfolio building is a vital skill that will get your learners reviewing, experimenting, presenting and reflecting on their progress and learning.

      As I've recently shared on twitter:

      "Reflective portfolios are not meant to be left to the last minute. They should capture the ‘aha’ moments, the ‘oh I did good!’ moments, and the ‘whoops, that didn’t go so well’ moments. The input is just as important as the output 🥰 "


      Source: https://twitter.com/


      So, how can you use portfolios? Portfolios could be:

      • collated during the length of the course, with learners reflecting on progress through a journal, and rounded off with a reflection and action plan
      • used to show the progress through a project or research
      • a showcase of current skills and knowledge for career planning and progression


      Tools for consideration

      • Assignment - allow for online text and multiple file uploads
      • Wiki - set to 'individual wiki' and the learners can add and structure content over time
      These can also be done individually or in groups.

      Mahara

      The above tasks can easily be facilitated using an ePortfolio tool such as Mahara.
      Mahara can be linked to your Moodle or Totara site's assignment tool, so you can use the same rubrics, grading forms and outcomes as you'd normally use:

      https://mahara.org/

      If you're interested in Mahara and how your learners could benefit from using it then please either reach out to your Learning Technologies team or to us via: https://www.catalyst-eu.net/contact-us/brighton

      Resources:

      • ePortfolios for Educators
        This is a resource created by me (Sam Taylor) to help anyone wanting to explore ePortfolio adoption in learning.

      • eBook curated by Lisa Donaldson, formerly of Dublin City University


    • Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator

  • Day 8

    • Seek activities on MoodleNet and other OER hubs

      As educators, we work very hard to make sure our learners have the best presented and most up to date information possible. We often take it upon ourselves to create resources from scratch, which can often be very time intensive.


      There are so many people out there who have openly shared their resources and are perfectly happy for you to use them. Problem is, where to look?

      OER repositories:

      These are places you can go to find content and courses that have already been created. These resources can also be edited and adapted to suit your learners' needs. Be sure to check the creative commons licence attached to each one. You can find some further information below:

      Moodle.Net

      If your Moodle administrator has it configured, you can pull in content from MoodleNet:


      Moodle Academy has made resources available to anyone who wants to explore this new tool, but if you have time, make yourself a drink and watch the video below:


      If you're interested in a MoodleNet demo or want to discuss setting up your own instance of MoodleNet for your organisation, get in touch!


    • Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator

  • Day 9

    • Review Accessibility and UDL


      How can I support students with additional needs?

      Although designing online learning is mainly about providing the correct content to your students and ensuring they are engaging with yourself and their peers, the format of the content, how it is presented and how it can be accessed is also very important. It is so important, in fact, that ensuring that the learning you create is accessible to learners is part of legal accessibility compliance laws.


      What do I need to consider for accessibility and inclusiveness?

      Make sure to consider all learning needs and preferences when designing your online content. For instance, would learners prefer to listen to a lecture or read lecture notes? Will they be using a screen reader? Will different learners use different backgrounds, reading guides or be able to independently change the font size of the text they're given? Are they going to access your content via mobile devices? Do you create transcripts and subtitles to go alongside video content? And so on so forth.

      All of the above would contribute to an inclusive learning experience! Giving learners the tools to adapt their online learning to suit their needs or preferences, you'll be helping them navigate the resources and activities you're creating in a way that's best suited for them.


      What tools do I have in preparing my online content in an accessible and inclusive way?

      Did you know that Moodle has a built in accessibility toolkit which helps you find and fix accessibility issues in courses? Watch the video below to learn more!

       

       


      How can I use course design to be accessible and inclusive?

      Catalyst consultants can support you with creating accessible content and provide demonstrations of tools! Feel free to contact us for more information and we'll be thrilled to help you adapt your content and make it as inclusive as possible.


      What is Universal Design for Learning?

      Universal Design for Learning, or UDL for short, is a framework widely used to improve teaching and assessment for students online. In other words, UDL is all about offering choice to students! Choice in why to learn and engage with learning, choice in what to learn and choice in how to learn and express learning.

      You can learn more on DCU's Teaching Enhancement Unit module:

       
       

      How can I apply accessibility tools to my LMS?

      To help you better and more easily achieve fully accessible content on your courses, we highly recommend Brickfield Education Labs, one of Catalyst's partners. They aim to inspire and enable institutions to deliver a more inclusive teaching and learning experience. Schedule a demo now to see how the Enterprise Moodle Accessibility Toolkit from Brickfield can help scaffold your staffs awareness, capability and effectiveness in creating accessible courses.




    • Suggested by Jasmin Davies-Hodge, Senior eLearning Consultant.

  • Day 10

    • Consider Wellbeing Options

      During the various COVID pandemic lockdowns, I was very fortunate enough to meet with a number of teachers, learning technologists and support staff to ask how they are coping with the rapid shift to online delivery and what advice they had for their colleagues when designing learning that takes digital wellbeing into consideration.

      I have presented on this topic many times, but see my GASTA (5min) presentation for the ALT Winter conference 2021 for a very quick recap of my 'Top 10 tips':


      Some tips in detail:

      As mentioned in a previous Catalyst Calendar (day 20), some of the tips included:

        • Podcast a lesson to listen to on a walk
          Once a week, provide one of your sessions as an audio-only resource, or perhaps encourage a fellow academic to discuss the subject with you and record it. This was students can listen to it through their mobile devices while out on a walk. If you want to provide a transcript (which we absolutely advise) you can use GoogleDocs to 'type with your voice'  https://support.google.com/docs/answer/4492226
        • Sketch your thoughts
          When responding to a task you can ask your students to respond by drawing/sketching/mindmapping their thoughts on paper. This can then be scanned and uploaded to the Moodle Assignment tool. According to Laura Busche "Cognitive psychologists have been studying the impact of sketching on brain functioning for years, and with good reason: Putting ideas to paper is a powerful way to extend one’s memory.". Hand Sketches – Things You Didn’t Know Your Doodles Could Accomplish

        • Set wellbeing reminders throughout your course
          Using labels, you can set restriction and completion rules so they can pop up and set intervals. For example, you can set a reminder to pop up after completing a quiz to go and get a glass of water from the kitchen, or go outside for 5 mins for fresh air

        •  Make groupwork matter
          Some feedback we received was that groupwork was very much appreciated by students, however to be fully effective there needs to be some further considerations:
          • Allow the groups to work together for longer. This gives learners a chance to build a proper relationship with their peers
          • Make groupwork task-orientated. Give them a problem to solve, and enough time to discuss strategies and solutions
          • Give them tools to facilitate this too! Put them in Moodle groups and let them have their own group chat in the Moodle messaging system, forum, wiki etc

        • Identify live vs asynchronous learning opportunities
          You've survived having to move your lectures to Zoom/BigBlueButton/Teams etc, now it's time to think about how to perhaps flip the balance so learning can take place prior to your live sessions, so that the time could be better spent on answer questions, going deeper into the subject matter. this makes learning more flexible, especially in times when illness is a very real prospect, having to study and work at home with other members of your household present, or maybe having to share a computer with siblings/parents.  If you haven't already looked into flipped learning, now is the time!



        • Structuring content for reduced cognitive load
          Some really great learning design advice would be to adhere to the following:
          • Make your structure clear in your Moodle course using topic headings 
          • Identify how long each activity will probably take
          • Chunk up content so that students can schedule time for them. For example, videos should be 5-7 mins
          • Use a mix of passive and active engagement (with breathing space in between!)
          • Give students chances to respond - leaning is a multi-way-way conversation between teachers, students and their peers.

      What next?

      We would absolutely love to work with you and your course teams to identify opportunities to weave wellbeing into your courses, so please get in touch if you want to buy a block of consulting hours.

    • Bonus tip!

      Did you spot the mini nature pictures throughout this page? 

      Research has shown that bringing in elements of nature into your space can be calming and soothing. Many of us became 'plant parents' during lockdown as they brought us joy - is there any way you can bring nature into your online learning space? Perhaps offer ambient soundscapes that your learners can have on in the background such as:


      If this is something that interests you, look up 'Biophilia'

      Plant icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
      Plant icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
      Pond icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
      Pebbles icons created by Chanut-is-Industries – Flaticon

    • Suggested by Sam Taylor, Senior eLearning Consultant and MEC Facilitator

  • Day 11

    • Review and test your course and content

      You did it, you have finished creating your course and made sure to keep all the advice we've given you in mind for the past 10 days. You're all set and ready to publish the course and set it free into the world.

      Or are you?


      Make full use of your staging or sandbox environment

      No matter how many times we may go through a course while we're putting it together, nothing beats actually completing it from scratch. Upload your course to your test environment and take full advantage of the freedom this sort of environment gives you, how it allows you to make mistakes and push the content to its limits without worrying about repercussions to your site or the content itself.


      Reviewing your freshly made online learning content

      Now that you have your online content prepared and your courses (seemingly) ready to launch, it's time to triple check for any loose ends you may have missed.

      When you go through the course from start to finish as if you were a learner seeing and engaging with this content for the very first time, make sure to consider the following:

      • Layout - are you presenting your content in a logical way? Is the course grouped on a week by week basis, or perhaps by learning outcome? Always remember to consider what structure would flow better for the learners following your course.
      • Goals and objectives - ensure that the goals for your online course, what the learner objectives are and how they will meet these are clear throughout.
      • Signpost - check that you've provided sufficient guides and scaffolding support, especially if you are introducing learners to a new technology or way in which they need to engage with the content or communicate with you or their peers.
      • Accessibility - make sure to get in touch with your student union, a class rep or an accessibility consultant to review your content for accessibility and how it interacts with different assistive learning technologies.




      Don't forget about Mobile Learning!

      Did you know that Moodle and Totara have mobile apps? They can be downloaded from the iOS and Android app stores and mostly revolve around providing learning on the go. If you decide to implement the app for users on your site, make sure to also check how your content looks like on a mobile device.




    • Suggested by Jasmin Davies-Hodge, Senior eLearning Consultant, and Lya Gobetti, eLearning Consultant.

  • Day 12

    • Seek feedback from colleagues

      If you've been following our advice thus far, we're hopeful that you should be fairly happy with the current state of your course: the content, the assignments and collaborations, the structure, the materials and reading list, etc.

      However, when you're immersed in any given activity for long periods of time it's normal for you to get accustomed to what you're seeing and thus miss small details that someone else should be able to pick up straight away. Not only that, but it's very easy to slip into an unconscious level of subject expertise by using phrases or acronyms and assumed knowledge that may make things harder for students.


      Getting your final work peer reviewed

      So once your course is finished, ask a colleague to peer review your course! This does not need to be - and in many cases shouldn't be - someone who works alongside you or someone who works in the same area as you do, but someone from an associated topic area with sufficient subject knowledge to be able to advise but not so much as to miss the same details you might overlook or fall into the same familiar language patterns. A neutral third party, if you will; someone who somewhat understands what they're looking at and thus is able to offer valuable feedback.

      If this is a refresh from a course that you previously launched, you could also ask a small group of learners (eg. course representatives from the previous year) to review the course as well, thus getting a learner's perspective and feedback.


      Trust your gut!

      Always remember though: at the end of the day, YOU are the subject expert, so don't feel pressured into acting on every single change your peer reviewers suggest. Reviews like this are aimed to share best practice in learning design and should be shared in that context.


      Assessment icons created by Freepik - Flaticon


    • Suggested by Richard Oelmann, Head of Business Development

  • Merry Christmas!

    Highlighted

    • Summary:

      It’s the season for giving and our way to give back to the wonderful community of teachers, trainers and learners was to impart some of the knowledge we’ve gained through our years of expertise working with Moodle, Totara and Mahara. For the past 12 days, our wonderful team at Catalyst have been working together to bring you some invaluable advice on how to design your course for your own LMS platform. Sam, Jasmin, Richard, Lya and Leanne curated this list and shared it with you with one goal in mind: helping you achieve course design excellence. 

      We’ve reviewed, restructured, checked, identified, sought, considered, and finished! We hope that these 12 simple steps have been worthwhile and helped you to enhance your course design!

      Here’s a quick recap to refresh your memory:

      • Look back at the previous iteration of your course and use all that you’ve learned since then to start planning the new content you’ll be developing;
      • Be aware of any potential or recent upgrades on your site’s version that could positively impact the content you’re creating;
      • Keep the structure of your course in mind when planning it out;
      • Review all external resources you may have linked throughout your course to make sure they’re all up to date;
      • Think about collaborative tasks that you can add to your course and how they may help learners throughout;
      • Consider adding activities that engage learners in self-assessment and self-reflection to make sure learners are keeping up with the content they’re being shown;
      • Portfolio building activities are also helpful and should get your learners reviewing, experimenting, presenting and reflecting on their learning;
      • Exploring potential open activities and resources that you may be able to add to your course but that you hadn’t considered or even knew existed;
      • Make sure your course is accessible to a variety of learners and students, regardless of their needs and/or preferences;
      • Be mindful of your learner’s wellbeing as you plan your course;
      • Go through your course from start to finish to make sure everything’s looking tip top;
      • Appoint one or more people to peer review your work to make sure it’s up to par and ready to be launched.


      We hope you enjoyed going through the 12 steps with us! We appreciate every single comment, likes and views, and now, all there’s left to do is for us to enjoy the festivities!

      All of us at Catalyst hope you have a wonderful time with your family and friends this December, wherever you are and however you celebrate. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! Here’s to 2023!