Dear Colleagues,

As @Can Uslay already hinted about in an email earlier this week, I have been working on creating a set of guidelines you can refer to when creating an online course for Summer and beyond. These guidelines are mainly based on the widely-accepted Quality Matters rubric and are augmented by some of my experiences. I would like to preface the document by saying that you will probably notice a lot of time is spent on ‘structure’ and ensuring that for example learning goals are clearly articulated throughout the course, but: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” One proven strategy I have found to work overall is to overcommunicate with your students in every sense.

In addition, I would like to share some very good resources I have received from my friends at Coursera:

• Moving online: What you can implement now to assist instructors and course teams around the world scrambling to move residential learning to online.

• Home video production toolkit to provide guidance for our partners on how to film outside a typical studio. This might be the most useful piece and I think a lot of those recommendations came from that “school up north” (a.k.a. U of Michigan).

• Tips for effective online learning to guide students, many of whom are taking online courses for the first time, on how to succeed in this new learning environment. This one may be good to circulate with students new to online learning at the beginning of the class.

• Webinar on Shifting from the classroom to remote teaching during COVID-19 to share recommendations and learn from our experienced partner community.

I am happy to answer questions about this, but @Alexander Sannella, @Mason Ameri and I are working on a comprehensive set of FAQs which will further help you on this online journey.

Best regards,

Rudi

Rutgers Business School Online Course Development Guidelines