Course Context

Typical Course Approaches & Layouts

Take some time to think about how your course may already be represented in other places such as your Programme Handbook. Also think about the ways that you think your students may be using the course to access materials.

It is possible to pick and choose various approaches described below.

Weekly Format

If your course runs to a regular weekly timetable and is broken down into meaningful weekly sections you may consider creating sections of your course for each week.

Each week section may contain information such as:

• Learning objectives, goals, and activities to be covered that week
• Lecture materials, reading lists, handouts, recordings, additional materials, etc.
• Space for activities such as discussions, blogs, wiki, virtual classroom etc.

Consider that this approach is very useful for navigating materials week-to-week, but how would students remember when content was referred to by week.

• Give your week sections meaningful titles related to their topics and objectives.
• Add additional links that refer to other areas of the course in relevant places
• Have a single area for Assessments and Assignments that can be linked to from a week section

Topic Based

It is possible to break down your course into meaningful topic/unit sections that may already be relevant according to your module descriptors and handbooks. Rather than having this content all stored in a single area in a generic content folder you can create separate sections for each topic/unit.

The course menu becomes a common way for navigating a course and is always visible no matter which page you are viewing.

Learn allows for some hierarchical structuring to your content so it is possible to create some sub-topics within your section to break down your content further into manageable chunks. However please be aware that adding too many levels of hierarchical structure can become overly complex. We recommend no more than 3 levels of structure:

Topic Name -> Sub Topic -> Content & Materials

Resources and Assessments

There are many courses where the content is broken down by type of materials that the student may be looking to access. This means that a student looks for materials based on the goal that they are trying to achieved and will look for the material in the relevant section.

Examples of this type of structure may include:

• Course Overview
• Lectures
• Readings
• Tutorials
• Assessment

This structure will often be applied across multiple courses in a school programme to offer a sense of consistency as all of their courses will fit these headings.

If your course is managed by multiple academics, administrators, etc. It can be hard to maintain consistency as people may not always put the materials in the correct location. You should develop clear guidance and allow people to review their courses regularly against this guidance to ensure consistency.

Narrative Style

Some courses lend themselves to a more narrative style where the course structure purposefully directs the student through a specific path and provides the content, materials, and activities at each specific step of the way.

These courses may use additional links in each section to direct the student to the next relevant area of the course.

Adaptive Release may be utilised by these courses to prevent some areas of the course from being accessible until certain areas of the course have been completed, or a student has achieved a certain score in an assessment or quiz.