Essentials of Online Course Design: A Standards-Based Guide (Essentials of Online Learning)

This book provides thorough yet succinct coverage of online class design and implementation. Authors Vai and Sosulski have distilled the material under study and presented only what is essential thereby accomplishing what instructors who meet with students face-to-face as well as instructors who deliver their instruction online should strive to do. The third and fourth chapters promote clear concise writing and visually appealing, uncluttered page layout. One of the exemplary lessons shows how the instructor breaks up or chunks a lesson into a series of sections: students read; examine pictures; reflect upon the content provided and complete a small project. Students will retain this lesson because they have an opportunity to apply the new information right away and yet they are not given too much content to wade through. People enrolled in online classes are often highly motivated but struggling with time constraints so a well-organized lesson that can be completed in one sitting is probably most beneficial for them."Essentials of Online Course Design: A Standards-Based Guide" also addresses online course standards, assessment, creating course objectives, student engagement and course technology. This book is a fraction of the size of comparable "how to design/implement an online course" books so reading the entire book when you need to design/implement an online course is practical and will give you the satisfaction of knowing that you have received the full import of this highly recommended guidebook.

I am not a "trained" teacher by any means, but I have a passion and knowledge in the area of inside sales that I want to share with others. This book has given me the confidence to create a suite of online courses for sales representatives that are informative and fun. It has also given me the confidence to create courses in other areas where I have knowledge I want to share.The authors have laid out the book in a way that allows us to easily navigate and implement the concepts they are teaching. As a result, I am able to rapidly deploy what I'm learning and create a class without extensive pre-planning. This also makes it easier to change course materials as our industry requirements change. A win-win for my students and me!I highly recommend the book as one of your go-to books you have stored either in your Kindle or on your book-shelf. Get out there and teach others!

I am a year into writing eLearning materials and, before I started, I looked for good guidance resources - there are not many about that I could find then. This one is just right. The chapters are relevant and easy to read, the check-lists (which I share with my editors and co-designers) make for straight forward communications between us. I am still working through the materials that are on the supporting web-site and I am inspired by what I see.My favorite chapter is about the visual design of written materials. I had already been striving to produce visually easy written materials and hade developed my own practices that were confirmed and advanced by the advice in this book.Next-up for me is to train a group of eLearning authors from partner organizations. I will use this Guide as the common text between us.I could still use a bit more guidance around how to make good formative assessment devices ... but that probably is LMS specific ...Many thanks to the authors for creating this excellent book.

I'm currently an EdD student in an educational technology leadership program. Among other things, I study the theories behind the advice that Vai gives in this text. I have a high level of interest in those theories, and I'm aware of the difficulties that can arrive from clumsy and misguided attempts to apply theory to practice.However, most educators teaching online classes are just not that interested in instructional design or multimedia theory. Most of them want to design a functional class so that they and their students can focus on achieving their course objectives.This book is good for both educators and those who handle technology policy. Vai's text is successful because it focuses on the practical but supports her clear advice with theory where necessary. All educational technologists that work directly with faculty should aim for the same sweet spot.

If you've ever been to a workshop on active learning where the presenter followed none of the best practices, you'll appreciate this little book. The authors conceived of a resource that adheres to the advice of John Maeda in Laws of Simplicity, 2006, and designed the book with the same principles they advocate for online course design. I read it over a weekend, but will be referring back to it again and again as I transition an elective science course to an online delivery format.This book is helping me--not only make the transition, but improve the course.The one disappointment: the accompanying website is currently not available, but I hope to see it soon.

This is a useful text for online design. Some of the guidelines are obvious, but it's important to cover the fundamentals. Would be useful if talked a bit more about real-world challenges of teaching online. For instance, what are some work flows for getting through a 100 student papers in a week? How can a computer be leveraged to make this as easy as possible?

They content was ok, a little too geared for university type courses. Would have much preferred a paper version as the kindle one was poorly formatted, text cut of, did not translate well.

The book is very informative, but I was not able to read as much of it as I wanted to because the print is very light throughout the work, and this made reading very difficult. I will consult the book from time to time, but I will not attempt to read the whole thing.