Online courses can be great, but not all courses are great! There are so many benefits of signing up to learn online but as you might have experienced, some courses can leave you feeling really let down. We’ve seen examples where organisations have simply put a pile of information online and left students to make sense of it all.
That’s not helpful and can certainly put you off learning online again. Here at Impact Tutoring we’ve invested a lot of time and effort into developing quality courses, so if you’re dubious about saying YES to another course, we wanted to share our 5 top course creation ‘rules’. Our hope is by sharing this behind-the-scenes insight about what we do, it’ll give you confidence to try online learning again.
Our top 5 course creation ‘rules’: Goals. Before we create any content, we ask ourselves what students need to know and set goals for the course. It’s an important step because there’s so much we could put include but that’s not going to make it a quality course.
Once we’ve set the goals, our expert course creators draw on their in-depth knowledge of the NZ school curriculum to pinpoint the information and activities that need to be included. Information and activities. There are many ways to present information and we are guided by two key principles - make the subject and material easy to understand, and support increased learning retention.
That’s why you’ll find a mix of theory, exercises, and quizzes in all of our courses. Platform. While the content of the course is important, if we just put it up on the Internet without any thought to how you’ll access it, we’d be setting you up for a disappointing experience.
We chose to partner with Intuto and use their platform for all our courses. It enables us to present the theory, exercises and quizzes in an easily accessible format and create a look that’s engaging. Assessment.
We know getting immediate feedback on exercises and quizzes is important for learning and retention. It provides the opportunity to identify where you’re doing well and to pinpoint the areas where you need to do further work. That’s why feedback is incorporated in all our courses.
Review and improvement. In our view, the course creation process is iterative. As well as asking students for feedback, we’re always looking out for advances in online teaching, new functionality and best practice ideas from experts like our platform provider Intuto.
There’s no sitting on our laurels! Our goal is to bring you quality courses that support your learning. So, there you have it, an insight into what we consider to be the 5 keys to creating a great online experience for students :)