12 High-level design: Planning your course

When you have committed to creating an Open course and had your proposal approved, plan in as much detail as possible the kind of learning experience you will provide to learners. Doing this enables you to develop a clear picture of what you want learners to be able to do after completing the course. From there you can design a sequence of learning tasks and activities that will enable this.

Planning at this stage is an important investment of time. If you do most of your thinking at this point, it’s much more likely that later stages of the project will proceed smoothly. For example, if you specify the key learning points for a topic and how the learner will engage with it here, it’s much easier to draft the detail later and ensure it meets the brief. It also avoids the requirement for considerable rework or editing if authors are unclear on what is required.