By Gerry Davis
Making the Switch
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Turning Face-to-Face Content into Meaningful Online Courses
convenience and flexibility have made online courses
increasingly popular across the education spectrum, from higher ed to professional development
to K– 12. (See “How to Become an Online Educator” on
page 20.) Of course, that means teachers now have another
skill set to master—designing online courses.
If you’re called upon to build an online version of your
K– 12 or professional development class, the good news is
that you don’t have to build an entirely new course from
scratch. You’ve already done the hard work of digging up
content for your face-to-face class. Now you just need to
format it for the Web, with special attention to how the
goals and logistics of a course change when you take it
out of the brick-and-mortar classroom.
To get you started, we have drawn up an outline of the
basic steps needed to go from your traditional course curriculum, through the logistics of organizing it for the Internet environment and launching the lessons on a workable
timeline, to the final goal of an online course that is both
rich in content and technically savvy.
