Create Online Courses That Make It Easy to Learn!

Contentstrategists work behind the scenes on web content production, curation, andmaintenance to develop processes that help content creators maintain fresh,relevant, useful content. Although “web content” may seem unrelated toinstructional content, if you create online courses, the two have more incommon than may meet the eye.

To beginwith, just like content strategy (CS), the work of instructional design is alargely behind-the-scenes discipline; students will get to know the instructorover the course of the learning experiences but never meet the instructionaldesign (ID) team. Yet the “invisible” work of the IDs is directly responsiblefor the successful student experience in online course websites.

In thisarticle, we focus on the “back end” of the course website—the creation,organization, and maintenance of a group of digital assets and how thesedecisions ultimately affect the front-end student experience.

What is content?

Our favoritecontent strategist and writer, Erin Kissane, describes content as “anythingthat conveys meaningful information to humans.” She also distinguishes betweencontent that’s public facing and content that is used to plan for public-facing content but which the public will never (orshould never) see.

We have thesedistinctions in instructional settings as well. Student-facing content is anydigital asset that comprises the course website: documents, assignments,interactions, learning objectives, competencies, quiz questions, images, andother multimedia.

There alsoare those course-related assets that students might never see: teachingobjectives, planning documents, and metadata. Just as with the content that isvisible to students, these “hidden” documents require a plan for creation,retrieval, and archival, as both the visible and hidden content affects onlinecourse design and impacts the learner experience.

Steal these techniques from contentstrategy

Here we offerfive techniques, borrowed from web content strategy, to help ensure efficientworkflows, consistent organization, and exceptional relationships with yoursubject matter experts (SMEs). Each of these techniques has direct implicationsfor the front-end experience of the student who interacts and engages withinstructional content in an online course website.

1. Maintain a content inventory

What it is

Acontent inventory can help you take stock of all the assets that comprise yourcourse website, previously defined as all those instructor-created documents,images, journal articles, multimedia, external websites, readings, syllabi,quiz questions, and assignments. You can also use acontent inventory to ensure and track alignment between course assetsand learning goals.

How to do it

Start smallwith information that is useful to you. You can do this in a simple spreadsheetthat tracks asset properties such as:

• Title
• Source/ citation
• Keywords
• Licensing
• Learningobjectives

Even if youare not starting a project from the beginning, you can still implement acontent inventory practice, and in this case, not worry about dead or inactiveassets.

No matter thesize of your project, be it a five-minute presentation or a 15-week fullyonline course, tracking content assets will serve you well now and into thefuture. When it is time for you to revise your project; you will know exactlywhat assets the course website contains and where each one came from. Shouldyou want to share your resources with a colleague, you will be able to pointthem to the location’s source. Should you have resources that might be usefulin other projects, you will have a complete and sortable repository in which tosearch.

How it improves the user experience

In a course environment,students benefit from materials that are current, relevant, and essential, nomatter how many times the course has been taught or by how many differentinstructors.

2. Streamline and unify contentcreation with templates

What it is

Contenttemplates encourage consistent format for core content, as well as help ensureconsistency across content that may have multiple authors. IDs can steal thistechnique to help instructors create multiple pages efficiently. Templates alsoensure completeness of information, since they act as a subtle checklist forthe SME to remember to include information on all aspects of the project orlesson.

How to do it

Firstidentify your main content categories, for example, assignments, groupprojects, or resource pages. Next, create a template for each content type, andstrive to maintain consistent look and feel across your templates.

For example,an assignment template would offer a consistent and complete presentationstructure for every assignment that appears in the course. The template for aset of learning guides would include the main section headers that you wouldinclude in each of the guides.

How it improves the user experience

Learnersbecome familiar with the way you do things, a phenomenon known in the web-usabilitycommunity as “learnability,” which increases the speed with which they will beable to navigate your course website to find the information they need.

3. Maintain a style guide

What it is

Style guidesare used by content strategists to help ensure that materials produced by ateam of individuals maintains some level of consistency, because there are bothteam-based and temporal challenges to creating content. These challenges caneven be present when one person creates content for a course over an extendedperiod of time, switching, for instance, between listing the assigned readingsabout x-rays as any of:

Read Chapter 1 on chest x-ray imaging,pp. 1-56

Read Ch1, CXR, pages 1-56

Read chapter 1, chest X-rays, p1 – p56

Any of theseoptions would get the job done communication-wise, but the resulting formattinginconsistencies tend to add up and potentially distract the learner.

When contentstrategists talk about style guides, they’re talking about a document that doesmore than just agree upon spellings and methods for listing things like chaptertitles and page numbers. The style guide also can contain:

• Strategiesfor cross-linking content throughout the course site,
• Plansfor metadata and versioning,
• Thecolors, typefaces, and typeface weights you will use to emphasize importantmaterial, and
• Plansfor consistent labeling of information.

How to do it

The biggerthe team and the bigger the project, the longer and more detailed the styleguide. However, it can be a hard sell to ask your busy SME to write down theirpreferred methods for referring to common vocabulary, and especially in gettingthem to adhere to established guidelines.

But makingdecisions, both large and small, about the way that you present content anddisplay it in an online course, can exponentially decrease confusion on thepart of the learner, particularly the novice learner.

Considertaking the initiative to compile the skeleton of the style guide for the SME atthe start of a project, after you’ve had time to familiarize yourself withtheir content, and populate it with some of the inconsistencies you’ve noticedas you’ve been working on their site. Obtain the SME’s approval of the document(and, therefore, buy-in) prior to making changes across an entire course site.

A style guidereturns exponentially increasing rewards: the earlier the SME commits to addingto, maintaining, and referring back to it, the more decisions they will be ableto offload as their content corpus grows.

How it improves the user experience

A style guideresults in a more structured, consistent experience for the learner.

4. Establish an editorial calendar

What it is

Strictlyspeaking, a content strategist’s editorial calendar is the primary vehicle togenerate new content or refresh existing published content. For example, whentime-sensitive information is posted to a site’s homepage, the editorialcalendar will alert the web team once the content has become outdated.

How to do it

Consideradding another column to the content inventory spreadsheet you’ve alreadystarted using. This column can be used to keep track of such key dates as:

• Courselaunch
• Unithide/unhide
• Coursemaintenance
• Assignmentdeadlines
• Hyperlinktests

You mightalso use the calendar to encourage the scheduling of regular strategydiscussions between the SME and the course development team.

How it improves the user experience

IDs cancapitalize on this idea to ensure that course websites remain accurate and relevantsemester after semester.

5. Establish a metrics plan for evaluation

What it is

A metricsplan helps the CS evaluate and plan for continuous improvement. But, like allassessment activities, it is helpful to define at the outset of a project what youmean by success.

Kissanesuggests identifying “victory conditions” at the start of every project—thatis, having a clear picture of what success will look like and how you willmeasure it.

For academiccontent, you will likely measure victory conditions via learner achievement oflearning goals using traditional summative assessment techniques like quizzesand other graded activities, but success also could be measured using data fromformative and summative evaluations.

How to do it

Build intoyour ID workflow a service process by which you gather and report user data tothe SME, such as how many times an asset is accessed, and how long students arespending on certain activities. Consult your LMS support team to find out whatlevel of learning analytics your system can capture.

Help the SMEunderstand the implications of that data. For example, if a critical asset isnot being used, you can advise investigating why. In all cases, you can helpexplore the question: what about the course design needs to change to create anoptimal user experience?

How it improves the user experience

Learnersmight be having difficulty locating the resource within the structure of thecourse. Or they might be abandoning a course video halfway through due to poorproduction quality or frustration with playback issues.

Instructional Designers as contentstrategists and advocates

Perhaps themost important part of our jobs is as advocatesfor the people who interact with course websites—both instructors and learners.We can advocate for both groups of users by:

1. Remindinginstructors what it was like to be a novice with content and helping build inclarity and consistency so they can focus on the content of the course.
2. Helpinginstructors organize and navigate their own course sites. They should becomfortable with where and how their content is stored.

Thesetechniques will ensure for the students—via all the methods we’ve discussedhere—that the learning environment is welcoming, clear, and consistent so that thefocus can be on learning and engaging with the content.

References

Wiggins, Grant P.,and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design.ASCD, 2005.

Kissane, Erin, and Kristina Halvorson. The Elements of Content Strategy. NewYork, NY: A Book Apart, 2011.