Content

Creating clear and measurable objectives is key to developing purposeful and systematic instruction.

In the United States, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), also known as the Buckley Amendment, is seen as relevant in that if students in the public web space are required to identify themselves and their affiliation with a particular institution and course, then this requirement could be seen as violating FERPA.

One way to sequence and group content in your online course is to create modules.

A Course Orientation Module serves as the orientation to an online course.

In an online course, a frequent criticism is that the PowerPoint presentations are poorly designed and critical supporting information is often missing (with no presenter to fill in the blanks!). On the other hand, instructional simulations combine multimedia elements (i.e. sound, images, video, etc) to represent (simulate) particular aspects of an actual situation (Hays, 2006).…

Converting the information contained in a PowerPoint presentation into multiple wiki pages can help online students process and understand the material in a more effective way.

How should you organize your content? Based on cognitive information processing (CIP) research (Mayer, 2001 & 2005), it is recommended to break down information into smaller, more manageable pieces or “chunks.”

Anchored instruction is the process of presenting instruction in the context of an authentic environment with problems or issues which learners must resolve.

An advance organizer is relevant introductory materials presented in advance in any format of text, graphics, or hypermedia (Ausubel, 1968). Instructors may use an advance organizer to present a framework for module content.