I consistently learn about what I plan to teach by actually doing rather than just reading in educational technology. I know what students will experience and what skills will help them by doing projects myself rather than just writing about them.  Reading about the theory of quality online learning is one thing but building a quality course is another. Experiential learning is an effective teacher.

First, you have to work within the limitations of the Learning Management System (LMS).  You may envision how you want your learners to experience the knowledge content but the LMS may not always play nice.  The project of building an introductory module for an online course gave me more opportunities to play with HTML coding as the formatting did not always result in how I planned.  By having to go in and tweak the code, it made me realize that to be an online instructor, having the ability to understand a bit of computer programming will help you greatly.  It may take too long to seek out the IT support person who knows how to resolve your formatting issue, so if the instructor can do fix the problem themselves it saves much anguish. If it seems shocking that a university instructor now needs to use coding to teach a course – well, welcome to the digital age. Many innovative thinkers believe that coding is the new ‘language arts’ and that children should be taught at a very young age in the same way you teach them to spell “cat” and “dog.” Like any skill, coding is not complicated if you begin early and without fear.

Secondly, course building takes time.  Putting it all together in the LMS is not the difficult step. The planning stage begins with a solid syllabus, consideration of validated assessments to be employed, and then the research, building or gathering of video and other multi-media artifacts.  I can easily see that a new faculty member who wants to teach a course could spend 6 months building the syllabus, with all the associated references and external sources, and another 6 months building the course.