Topic outline

  • General

    Collapse all Expand all

    • 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