16 Developing an outline for your course
To gather inputs from a variety of sources (colleagues, educators, online learning specialists, students, etc.), it’s a good idea to create a document or online space that captures the key information you’ll need to create the course. You can use this to develop your preliminary ideas from your original proposal, providing the next level of detail.
The table on the next page includes considerations that will be useful to agree and capture during the process of developing your outline. Add entries for your course in the right-hand column.
| Course outline section | Your course outline |
|---|---|
| Learning outcomes
Write clear learning outcomes that describe the skills, knowledge or understanding the learner will develop by completing the course. |
|
| Course syllabus
This is the journey your learners will take through the course. It needs to make sense to them, building on what has gone before and anticipating what is ahead. |
|
| Sections and sub-sections
Specify what each section in your course will involve This includes: |
|
| Learning Type
Review the type of learning you have planned for each section of the course. You can use Laurillard’s learning types to ensure that you include a suitable mix of approaches to promote active learning within |
|
| Responsibilities
Identify who will be responsible for drafting the detailed learning content at a later stage. |
|
| Estimated duration
Estimate how much time learners might spend on each section. This will give you a sense of whether you’re providing the right amount of learning in the right amount of detail, both |
In Appendix 4: Course Outline, you can find a completed version of the Course Outline that a Course Design Manager at Leeds used to capture the above information for an existing course. This was created to specify a course that is currently being hosted on the FutureLearn platform.
