Determining how you will develop and deliver your content is considered more time-consuming than developing a face-to-face course. Therefore, Nagel and Kotze (2010) strongly recommend that faculty create an organized course with explicit detail and expectations thus laying the foundation for your teaching presence. The following strategies will help you save time and maintain an orderly and organized online course.


Setting Up Your Course

Every semester you need to create a new course shell to house that semester's students and class content. Before you can request a course account, you need to ensure that your course is listed in the UCF course schedule and that you are listed as the instructor of record (you cannot request a course account if you are not listed as the instructor of record). If your students are unable to register for your course, you will need to contact your department scheduler. Once the course is available on MyUCF, you must request your course through the Faculty Webcourse Manager. Instructions are provided on the Start of Semester Checklist. 

Keep in mind that the Semester Checklist is an incredibly useful document as it contains a variety of information that will help you get your courses ready for your students ( e.g., you can link multiple sections of the same course together so that you only have to manage one course).

As you have learned throughout IDL6543, CDL has created several templates to assist you with creating your online course.  To add the templates to another course, please contact Webcourses@UCF Support.


The Course Time Line

As with your face-to-face class, your online course will have an ebb and flow. It may be hard to predict exactly how your course will run when you first teach it. Follow the suggestions below to help minimize potential issues that may arise:

Before the Course Starts

First Week of Course

During the Course

End of Course


Optional Further Reading


References

Creative Commons License

TOPKit Sample Course was prepared by the University of Central Florida (UCF). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.