Course Design Formula: How to Teach Anything to Anyone Online

The name for this type of design process is backward design.1 You might find it familiar from Stephen R. Covey’s reminder, in The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, to “begin with the end in mind.”2

In The Essentials of Learning for Instruction, educational researcher and theorist Robert M. Gagné, Ph.D., defines instruction as the “arrangement of external events to activate and support the internal processes of learning.”3

In creating an online course, you need to make those types of connections clear for your course participants as well. You need to have their full attention riveted on you before you start to present them with new information. They need to know how your new information will benefit them in ways that promote their survival and well-being.

The difficulty that is an integral or built-in part of a subject matter is intrinsic cognitive load.

Schemas: Mental Containers for Storing Knowledge Once a new piece of information has passed through the narrow doorway into the brain’s storage area, it has to be unpacked, analyzed, sorted, and labeled before it can be stored.4 That

You, the course creator, are at the point of building activities into your lesson to help your students go over the new material you’ve just taught them.

How do you identify the prior knowledge your learners must have to ensure they are ready to understand, absorb and benefit from what you are about to teach them?

Step 2: From this menu of options, identify and demonstrate the desired attitude choice. Once you have made your learners aware of the different types of attitudes they can choose to adopt, and the costs and benefits of each, it is important to model for them what the right option (the attitude you are trying to teach them) looks like. Learners are

You will get your learners’ attention if you make it clear to them that your course is going to provide something that they want and need in order to make their lives better.

It means that in order for your course to deliver real transformation, it’s not enough for you to simply tell your course participants what you already know. That would not be teaching, but merely exposing people to information. In order to teach others what you already know, you must take them through a structured series of steps that make it poss