Lesson 9 - Quality Teaching in a Digital Age

10.9. Key Principles in Structuring a Course

Now there may be good reasons for not doing some of these things, but this will be because of pedagogical rather than institutional organizational reasons. For instance, I’m not keen on continuous enrollment, or self-paced instruction, because especially at graduate level I make heavy use of online discussion forums and online group work. I like students to work through a course at roughly the same pace, because it leads to more focused discussions, and organizing group work when students are at different points in the course is difficult if not impossible. However, in other courses, for instance a math course, self-paced instruction may make a lot of sense.

I will discuss other non-traditional course structures when we discuss student activities below. However you structure the course, though, two basic principles remain:

• There must be some notional idea of how much time students should spend each week on the course
• Students should be clear each week about what they have to do and when it needs to be done