How To Quickly Convert In-Class Content into a Functional Online Course in 7 Steps

I've been helping educators to create effective online learning experiences for the past 15+ years. Most of those conversations have allowed for us to take a relatively large chunk of time to properly prepare and curate an effective online course. The luxury of time has never been easy to come by in education, but even in the most pressured situations there are usually at least a couple of weeks if not months available for putting things together. With recent calls for preventative social distancing in an attempt to flatten the curve of infection for COVID-19 in the U.S., more and more schools are asking educators to convert the courses they've been teaching face-to-face to an online format. Sometimes teachers are given weeks, and sometimes they only have a few days to complete a level of work that most full time professionals need months to do well.

Photo by Thomas Lefebvre on Unsplash

In these types of situations I fully agree with writers like Rebecca Barret-Fox who recently published a blog with several helpful tips for taking a realistic and reasonable approach to accomplishing this daunting task quickly. Most of the other checklists and best practices available focus on strategies that take time to implement effectively. In my experience, high expectations almost always undermine real progress when teaching with new technologies. It just isn't reasonable to attempt to create an amazingly dynamic and interactive online course this quickly. I hope that the following 7 steps will be a helpful starting point for those of you with only a few days.

1. Collect all of the materials that you already have that serve as an outline for your course. This includes things like syllabi, course schedules, and even assignment lists. If you have any documented weekly announcements or overviews be sure to have them ready as well.


2. Identify a structure that your course can be arranged into. For example, if your course schedule is listed out by week, consider structuring all of your course content around weekly modules. Similarly, if your course syllabus arranges information and assignments around major themes or topics, consider structuring your course content around topical or theme-based units.


3. Recreate the chosen structure within the Learning Management System (LMS) that your educational entity uses (i.e. Schoology, Canvas, Desire2Learn, BlackBoard, Moodle, etc.). To do this, you'll need to know whether the LMS uses 'modules' or 'units' as the 'buckets' where course materials, assignments, and activities can be presented together as one package rather than spread out across all of the various tools. LMS tools include things like, individual pages, assignments, discussions, and files. Units/Modules provide an option for packaging all related information together so students can access them all at once.
   
   
4. Once a module or unit structure is in place, you'll need to add the relevant materials to each of them. This means you'll need to upload all readings or files that students need access to, create pages for any content that can't be uploaded, and create any assignments/discussions that students will be responsible for completing.


5. Use the grade-book tool in your LMS to create a grade item for each assignment or activity that students will receive a grade for. Be sure to attach each grade item to the appropriate assignment as you create it. For example, if students will be graded for uploading an essay during the first module, you'll need to create a grade item titled after that assignment (i.e. "Module 1 Essay" that is also manually linked to that assignment. Once students upload the assignment, you'll then be able to use the grade-book item to provide them with feedback.


6. Review and finalize the grade-book for your course to ensure that all graded elements are linked to the correct grade items, and that all grade points add up to the total possible points for the course. It is also possible to create a grade item that is not attached to a specific assignment. For example, you may want to create grade items for "extra credit" or for "participation" that you plan to manually enter points into for each student.


7. Last minute checks for access, build, copyright, and due dates are also vital (check your ABCD's).
   
   • Access: be sure that all content is published and visible to students (in addition to publishing individual modules and elements created within the course, some LMS's also require you to publish the full course manually before students will be able to see anything).
   
   
   • Build/Navigation: switch to the 'student' view at least once and run through the course to make sure that things are as easy to find as possible. You'll want to be sure that a student logging into the course for the first time will be able to figure out where to find important information, and how to move through the course successfully.
   
   
   • Copyright: double check that any videos, photographs, or resources that you did not create include appropriate citations and links. Fair Use is often leaned on when creating online educational experiences, but should not be relied on by itself. We are still responsible for making a reasonable effort to credit original sources.
   
   
   • Due Dates: triple check that all of the assignments you've created also have due dates set, and that those due dates are accurate. The LMS will also often require that you set a due date time (i.e. Sunday, 3/15 by 11:59pm) and will often default to a specific time zone. If your students are in varying time-zones it will be important to clarify that for them early on.

TIP: Almost every LMS has a dedicated help section, hotline, chat-room, and/or a set of robust user guides that can be accessed online for up-to-date instructions when completing the steps above. Be sure to familiarize yourself with those resources as they will probably be extremely useful, especially if this is your first time using the LMS. 


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