A course of study is much more than a series of lectures.
What happens inside the classroom forms only a part of the learning experience. It's not what you do, but what the students do, that causes learning to occur.

Good teachers have for centuries held these truths to be self-evident.
But until recently, there wasn't much they could do about it, aside from authoring a comprehensive textbook with readings, activities, quizzes, and cross references. But new digital technologies offer just about every teacher the ability to create and publish a complete course of study that includes all of the pieces we know are necessary for effective learning. And teachers are doing just that, assembling podcasts, assignments, readings, experiments, groups research projects, quizzes and exams for their courses into online masterpieces.

Why are they doing this?

Their motivations are wide-ranging:

• I want to make it easy for myself, each time I teach that course, to have all the materials online and ready to go, so all I need to is turn it on in Blackboard and the students have all they need. No more photocopying, no more reserve shelf, no more rifling through filing cabinets looking for the necessary articles.
  
  
• Next semester I'll be doing my data-gathering in Kenya, and I want to make sure my substitute teaches the course correctly. By putting everything online, I have some level of assurance that what the students do will get them where they need to be.
  
  
• Last year our campus was closed for three weeks because of the flu epidemic. I noticed that my colleagues who had posted their courses online were able to keep their students on task during the hiatus. So I want to do the same, in case something like this happens again.
  
  
• As a department, we've invested quite a bit of intellectual energy in designing this introductory survey course. We want to capture what we have once and for all so that it can live on beyond the individuals assigned to teach the course, and serve as a living, growing set of resources for faculty and students.
  
  
• I've got 12 different adjuncts teaching this course this term. The only way to keep consistency in what they teach and what the students learn is to put all the materials, from readings to quizzes to assignments, online in one place, and enroll all the sections in it. The adjuncts like it, and we have fewer complaints from students.
  
  
• Each semester about 25% of our juniors and seniors are studying abroad or doing fieldwork that keeps them away from campus. Yet they still have to get credit for these required courses. By putting the courses online, they can participate fully no matter where they are. We can even pipe them right into the seminars with videoconferencing.
  
  
• Nobody publishes a textbook that fits my course exactly. And there aren't enough students in the marketplace to justify such a book. So I've assembled the equivalent of a textbook and more on our school's learning management system. Its full of readings, video clips, news articles, quizzes, and assignments that I've created or collected. I've even recorded all my lectures as podcasts, with illustrations and slides. It's quite an opus.
  
  
• I want my students to be able to learn no matter where they are: on campus, at home, driving, riding, at the beach, on the subway. So we've packaged our course materials into formats they can display on their laptops or their iPods -- everything, from research studies to quizzes to lectures. We have found when they carry my course in their pockets, they tend to spend more time with it and learn more.
  
  
• One of my colleagues at our sister institution in South Africa would like to offer our advanced physics course, but has neither the resources nor the expertise to assemble such a course on her own. By allowing her and her students to tap into our Moodle-based course, they can benefit from our work.

What are they doing?

They are all thinking outside the classroom box. Rather than defining a course of study as what happens between 11:00 and 12:25 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from September through December, they are thinking about how students learn in this 21st century, and building new types of courses. They focus less on their lectures, and more on their assignments; they take advantage of the digital devices and networks that enable students to learn anytime and anyplace; they consider their limited face-to-face time with students as an opportunity to delve deeper and accomplish what can't be done through reading or listening. They design very different courses of study, more comprehensive, more interactive, more easily updated, richer in content, and more challenging to students.

What are the results?

When you put a course online, you think twice about it. Or three times. You consider carefully what you present, and how you present it. You pay special attention to what you ask the students to do, and create new assignments that keep them more involved.  You include more cross-references. You ask colleagues to look at what you've posted and ask for their advice. The act of digitization makes the course better.

It also makes the course easier to teach, once it's all "up there." It's easier to add new material, to delete the old, make connections between items. Adjuncts and substitutes are easier to find and more effective when they work from an authoritative set of digital resources.

Students learn better, not only because the course is now better structured, but because their easy access to the materials -- especially on mobile devices -- makes them more likely to spend more time with it.

And you can reach more students; students in other majors; students in developing countries who could benefit from your expertise; students not on campus; students in the world of work who cannot study on your schedule.

Key considerations

Successful online courses do not start inside the classroom box. They start by considering what students need to learn about the topic at hand, and then designing a series of activities for them to do that will lead them to learn. They make students see the topic from several conflicting points of view; they force them to wrestle with the key ideas and controversies; they build in assignments in which they must discuss these ideas with their peers; and they require them to prove what they have learned frequently and authentically.

For more ideas on creating effective online courses, see