Introduction to online course structure

In online course design, structure matters—a lot. There are two levels of structure we need to consider when designing an online course: the overarching structure of the course and the structure of individual modules, units, or weekly topics. (Please note that we will be using “modules” as the weekly organizational unit in this course, but your institution’s choice of nomenclature might be different.)

At the course level, structure is typically conveyed via

• a course outline and/or course schedule, which provides an overview of topics, learning activities, assessments, and due dates; and
• the navigation structure in the learning management system (LMS) or other system that is used to deliver the course.

At the module/content level, structure is typically conveyed via

• a module overview page, or other representation of the overall module content, which provides an overview of the topics, links to content, learning activities, and assessments pertinent to that module; and
• concept maps and organizational visuals, which convey how concepts are related to each other, and provide learners with important information about content structure both between and within modules.

We will consider all of these ways to structure your course and modules in this section.

Why structure matters

Why making course structure visible is important

For instructors, mapping out your course (for example, in a course schedule) is a great way to determine the length of topics, when to schedule assessments, and when feedback should be provided to learners (i.e., ideally prior to when subsequent assessments are due). It helps to make your organization of topics, and the relevance of associated assessments, visible to your learners.

For learners, a clear course structure helps them understand what to expect in the course, and what is expected of them every week. This helps to reduce their anxiety and allows them to better organize and manage their time. Good structure also increases findability, which is important to online learners.

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Why making content structure visible is important

As described in Module 1.4 The Nine Events of Instruction framework, it can be challenging for learners who are new to a field of study to conceptualize how the various elements of that field are connected. Research has shown that novice learners often experience new fields of knowledge as a series of isolated facts or formulas to master, and don’t have the background knowledge to perceive the structure of the discipline. Without this kind of knowledge structure, it is difficult for them to process, comprehend, and retain new information (Ambrose et al., 2010; Bransford et al., 1999).

Making the structure of a field of knowledge explicit can help by providing a framework or schema into which learners can fit new knowledge, so that “new material is integrated not into an aggregate of facts and terms but into a pre-existing organization of learned knowledge” (Nilson & Goodson, 2018, p. 41). An effective way of doing this is to create a concept map or other organizational visual indicating how course topics are connected to each other.

Caption: Making the structure of a field of knowledge explicit helps learners fit new knowledge into pre-existing disciplinary structures, which helps them retain it better and connect it to prior knowledge.
Credit: University of Waterloo | Image Description (PDF)

How to create a coherent course structure for your learners

Start with backward design

In Module 1.5 Using backward design, we introduced the concept of backward design, which provides an excellent starting point to a coherent, well-structured course. Taking the time at the planning stage of course design to think carefully about your course learning outcomes and to align these with your content, activities, and assessments will go a long way toward creating a clear and well-organized course.

Create an organizational visual outlining the course structure

Organizational visuals like concept maps can help you to sequence your content into logical and meaningfully related sections/modules. They are also an excellent way to make the structure of your course visible to your learners, which can help them visualize the relationships between topics and provide them with a “big picture” view of how knowledge is structured in your discipline. Your modules may map directly onto the number of weeks in your course (so that Module 1 occurs in week 1, etc.), or your modules may span across several weeks. Use the structure that makes the most sense for your course, and make sure it is presented to learners clearly.

A (meta)example of how to make course structure visible with an organizational visual

Caption: The course pathways organizational visual in High-Quality Online Courses helps orient learners to the structure of the course.
Credit: University of Waterloo | Image Description (PDF)

Create clear module titles

Learners benefit from descriptive module titles that make the weekly content focus visible. Titles like Week 3 or Module 3 convey nothing about the topic covered in that week/module. The following example is much better—it aids findability and tells learners exactly what to expect in the module.

Create a course schedule

A course schedule is an indispensable planning tool for learners, providing an overview of topics, learning activities, assessments, and due dates for each week of the course.

You may find it useful to use an assessment planning table like the one below to get a sense of how frequently your assessments occur across the weeks of the course. Remember that assessments aren’t required every week—depending on your outcomes, you may choose a few (scaffolded) major assessments rather than weekly lower-stakes assessments (see Module 2.4 Eliciting Learner Performance to learn about scaffolded assessments). The assessment schedule should be manageable for you, your TAs (if applicable), and for your learners.

Caption: Example of a completed assessment planning table.

How to create a coherent module structure for your learners

Create Module Overview/Weekly Introduction pages

Module Overview/Weekly Introduction pages are a good way to orient learners to what is expected of them in any given module or week. A Module Overview/Weekly Introduction page should include the following elements:

A short introduction

Provide a brief overview of the topic, make connections to prior learning, capture your learners’ attention/pique their curiosity, and establish relevance. See Module 3.4 Gaining Learner Attention and Module 3.5 Strategies for Increasing Engagement and Motivation for more information.

Module learning outcomes

See Module 1.6 Writing Effective Learning Outcomes for more information about why module learning outcomes matter and how to write them.

A diagnostic assessment

If relevant, include a link to a diagnostic assessment to surface misconceptions or gaps in your learners’ understanding. See Module 1.7 Learning About Your Learners for more information about creating diagnostic assessments.

Key terms

Making key terms available at the start of a new topic of study is a pre-training technique designed to reduce cognitive overload by offloading some of the cognitive processing learners have to engage with in the content, to the pre-training episode. See Module 3.5 Presenting the Content below for more information about pretraining and other strategies to avoid cognitive overload in your presentation of content.

Links to weekly resources, activities, and assessments

Last but not least, the findability of course materials is greatly improved when your Module Overview/Weekly Introduction pages include links to the following:

• segmented topic/content sections for that module;
• an overview or list of the activities (including readings) that learners are expected to complete that week;
• an overview or list of assessments that learners are expected to complete that week, together with a link to the course schedule, which outlines due dates; and
• supplementary resources related to the module topic.

A (meta)example of how to make content structure visible with a Module Overview page

Use learning management system (LMS) templates

Many postsecondary institutions have created online course templates, available through the institution’s LMS, which are easy for instructors to access and adapt for their courses. Where available, these are a simple and effective way to structure and organize your course, as they often include templates for course schedules and Module Overview/Weekly Introduction pages, so that you don’t have to start from scratch.

When applied across all online courses at an institution, these templates provide a consistent and familiar navigation experience for learners. As Jakob Nielsen explains in his “Law of Internet User Experience,” familiarity is an important aspect of good user experience:

Users [or, in our context, online learners] spend most of their time on other [course] sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. Design for patterns for which users are accustomed.”

(Nielsen, n.d.))

When we “design for patterns for which users are accustomed,” we reduce cognitive load for our learners, as they’re not spending valuable processing time trying to figure out the course structure, or the LMS interface, or locating where things are in the course. Instead, they can focus on their learning. (To learn more about cognitive load, see Module 3.5 Presenting the Content.) As much as possible, we want to ensure that the experience of navigating an online course is intuitive for learners; when it isn’t, this can become a source of frustration and interfere with learning. For more information about designing intuitive online courses, take a look at the UXDL Honeycomb: How Do We Create Intuitive (Findable and Usable) Learning Experiences?

Credit: Wavebreakmedia/iStock/Getty Images Plus (Copyrighted image. Do not copy, modify, or redistribute.)

Where available, LMS templates often include the following adaptable pages:

• Module Overview/Weekly Introduction pages,
• basic HTML-content pages with prestyled headings and subheadings,
• Course Outline/Syllabus page,
• Course Schedule page,
• various Activity or Assignment pages with instructions,
• Course and University Policies page, and
• Required Readings page (if applicable or not otherwise included on a content page).

Below, we’ve curated a partial list of LMS templates available on common LMS vendor sites, and at some Ontario PSE institutions. Check to see whether your institution has LMS templates available to help you structure your course!

Create an organizational visual outlining the content structure

Much like course-level organizational visuals, module-level organizational visuals are a useful planning tool for you and make the relationships between concepts within a module transparent to learners. This helps them better retain new knowledge and connect it to prior knowledge. As Nilson and Goodson (2018) explain,

Students learn new material better and can remember it longer when they receive it in an organized structure or when they organize and structure it themselves (if they are ready to do so). In fact, the only way people remember anything long term is in a coherent, logically organized structure based on patterns and relationships among interconnected parts” (p. 81).

As Nilson and Goodson suggest, having your learners create concept maps of the content in a module is also a good way to help them learn the structure of the discipline (e.g., as an assessment or other learning exercise). If they’re not quite ready to do this, Darby and Lang (2019) suggest providing your learners with a partially completed concept map or other structure document such as a note outline (p. 189). Take a look at Darby’s Skeletal Outline Example (PDF), posted on the Association of College and University Educators’ Online Teaching Toolkit site, as an example of this approach.

Below we provide some examples of organizational visuals across a variety of disciplines and course contexts.

Examples of how organizational visuals could work