The Journey to Online – Leveling Up

Notice: These courses will be deprecated at the end of the fall 2024 semester. Please reach out to us about accessing the latest professional development opportunities for UW System faculty.

Whether you have recently started to teach online or if you have been doing it for years, one thing is true—it’s a journey! Because this journey can be challenging, we have created the following three courses to help you navigate your way to success. Throughout them, we emphasize evidence-based best practices, and we took care to get faculty feedback on the course design and presentation to make sure they are easy to use and contain helpful information. We recommend that you take the courses in order, but if you have experience with online teaching, you can blaze your own trail.

Before embarking on this journey, download the Planning Guide. This practical resource pulls together key activities that are designed to help you reflect on what you want from your course, then get it up and running, or “leveled up” if you already have one made. Also, the Announcement area on this site will highlight course updates, so sign up to be alerted of any changes. Finally, your campus’ staff are eager to assist you, so do make sure to take advantage of your local resources.

Download Planning Guide

A Pathway to a Successful Online Course

Planning

The planning course prepares you to create high-quality, online courses. You will learn how to best outline and structure your online course, how to write measurable learning objectives, how to develop an assessment plan that aligns with the course objectives, and finally, how to identify quality learning resources for students.

Self-Enroll

Developing

Developing a high-quality online course requires attention to activity and assessment design, content delivery techniques, and the student experience. This course takes an in-depth look at alignment, engagement, and scaffolding as important components of high-quality online courses. It does this by considering how courses and lessons are organized, the connections between objectives and assessments, the different types of assignments and activities, and how learning materials are presented.

Self-Enroll

Teaching

Compared to teaching face-to-face, teaching an online course requires a different set of skills. This course provides tips and strategies to help you develop and enhance those skills. The first module addresses the course community and your role in establishing and maintaining it. The second module covers strategies for giving effective feedback. The third and final module provides practical advice on how you can manage and moderate online discussions.

Self-Enroll

Announcements

This website is under active development. Changes and additions will be announced here.

For additional questions about teaching online, please re... 06/03/2020

What Faculty are Saying

This set of three sites – Planning, Developing, and Teaching Your Online Course - includes important just-in-time information in a friendly browsable format. Each of these three sites also model effective course design. A variety of resources, in a variety of formats, is carefully curated to give an instructor the tools, strategies, and grounding principles that will support both new course design and improvement for existing online courses. The collection of sites works for both veteran online instructors and those who are coming to online instruction for the first time.

- Kim Kostka | UW-Rock County

Use of the materials provided by UW Extended Campus will enable you to develop a meaningful and captivating online course experience for your students. Their process, combined with specific examples, highlights the crucial differences in an online environment and why the course construction component is so essential to student engagement.

- Steve Dunn | UW Oshkosh