Most of us were handed an empty course shell and a start date. Nobody showed us where things should go, so courses grow by accretion: a folder here, a link there, three places to find the same due date. Students then spend their effort finding the work instead of doing it.
There is useful research on this, and most of it points the same way. Below is what the evidence supports, followed by a layout you can copy.
1. Use one pattern and repeat it every week
When every week looks the same, students stop having to learn the course and can attend to the content. Researchers who evaluated a shared online-course template across a department found that students and faculty both rated the consistent format and access positively, and that students found it more beneficial to their learning than faculty judged it to be for their teaching (Scutelnicu and colleagues, 2019).
The Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric (Seventh Edition), which many schools use to review online courses, asks for the same thing in plainer terms: "Course navigation facilitates ease of use."
Every LMS has a container for this. In Canvas it's Modules. In Blackboard it's Learning Modules or folders on the Course Content page. Brightspace calls them modules within Content, and Moodle uses weekly or topic sections. The name matters less than using one container per week, in order, with nothing important outside it.
2. Put a Start Here area at the top
The first two Quality Matters standards are about orientation: "Instructions make clear how to get started and where to find various course components," and "Learners are introduced to the purpose and structure of the course."
A Start Here area should answer five questions on one screen:
- What is this course and how is a typical week laid out?
- What do I do first?
- How and when can I reach you, and how fast will you reply?
- Where are grades, and how are they calculated?
- Where do I get technical and academic help?
3. Show how objectives, activities and exams connect
Quality Matters standard 2.4 says: "The relationship between learning objectives, learning activities, and assessments is made clear." In practice, start each week's overview with the two to four objectives for that week, and label each activity and quiz with the objective it serves.
This also protects you. When a student asks why a question was on the exam, you can point to the objective and the week it was taught. If you can't, that's worth knowing before the exam goes out.
4. Keep videos short and split them by topic
In an analysis of 6.9 million video-watching sessions across four edX courses, Guo, Kim and Rubin (2014) found that median engagement time was at most 6 minutes regardless of how long the video was. They recommend segments shorter than 6 minutes. They also found that classroom lectures recorded and chopped up afterwards were less engaging than videos planned as short pieces, and that videos mixing the instructor's face with slides held attention better than slides alone.
Those were open online courses, not a nursing cohort with an exam on Friday, so treat six minutes as a direction, not a law. The practical version: one concept per video, named for what it covers ("Loop diuretics: what to monitor"), so students can find it again when they review.
5. Build in weekly low-stakes retrieval
Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) reviewed ten common study techniques. Practice testing and distributed practice were rated high utility. Rereading and highlighting, which is what most students do by default, were rated low.
You can design both high-utility habits into the course:
- A short quiz each week that costs few or no points and can be retaken.
- A few questions in each quiz from earlier weeks, so older material keeps coming back.
- Feedback that explains why the right answer is right.
6. Make your presence scheduled and visible
For distance education in the United States, federal rules (34 CFR 600.2) require "regular and substantive interaction." Substantive means engaging students through at least two of these: direct instruction, assessing or giving feedback on coursework, answering content questions, facilitating a group discussion, or another activity your accreditor approves. Regular means on a predictable and scheduled basis, with follow-up when a student is struggling or asks for help.
Quality Matters standard 5.3 asks that this plan be stated in the course. A simple version:
- A Monday announcement with the week's focus and one common mistake to avoid.
- Replies to messages within one business day.
- Feedback on graded work within a stated number of days.
- One set office hour, plus appointments.
The Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 2000) describes why this matters: online learning depends on teaching presence, social presence and cognitive presence together. Students need to see that someone is designing and directing the course, not only that content exists.
7. Design for the student who can't see, hear or sit still for an hour
Captions, readable headings, descriptive link text and documents that work with a screen reader are covered by the last Quality Matters standard, Accessibility and Usability. Your LMS has an accessibility checker; run it once per module. Captions also help students studying on a break at work with the sound off.
An example week you can copy
Name every week the same way: Week 6: Heart failure (Oct 5 to 11).
- Overview (one page): what this week is about, 2 to 4 objectives, a checklist of everything due with dates, and about how long it should take.
- Learn: readings with page numbers, then 3 to 5 short videos named by topic.
- Practice: a low-stakes quiz, 8 to 10 questions, 2 or 3 from earlier weeks.
- Apply: a case, discussion or unfolding scenario tied to one objective.
- Graded work: the assignment or exam, with the rubric attached in the same place.
- Wrap-up: a two-minute "muddiest point" survey you answer in next Monday's announcement.
Outside the weekly modules keep only four things: Start Here, Syllabus and schedule, Grades, and Help.
What the research does not say
A U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis (Means and colleagues, 2010) found that students in online conditions performed modestly better on average than those taught face to face, and that blended courses did better still. The authors cautioned that blended courses often included extra time and extra instructional elements, so the gain shouldn't be credited to the technology itself. The lesson for course design is that the layout doesn't teach. It removes obstacles so that your teaching, practice and feedback can.
Check that the exam matches the map
Once objectives are attached to weeks, the next question is whether the exam tested what those weeks taught. MapMyExam reads your item analysis and, if you paste in your objectives, shows which ones the exam tested, which it skipped, and which questions didn't work. Your first exam is free.
Related: Are we asking the right questions on nursing exams?