Best Practices for Designing a TEL Course

Here are some guidelines/best practices for you to follow to make your TEL, web-delivered course accessible, effective, and fun for your students:

• Always put the learner first when you design a course
• Always put pedagogy (ISD) before technology.
• When developing your course, do the narration last!
• Make sure that all graphics/photos used in your course have ALT Tags.
• Make sure all video is closed-captioned and scripted (in the "slide notes").
• Make sure all your list items end with a period. This is an accessibility guideline so that speech browsers will pause before going on to the next listed item.
• Make sure all imported Flash® or Camtasia® movies/animations are fully scripted in the slide notes.
• Always write clear objectives and goals for the course, course lessons and topics.
• Do not add unnecessary animations (eg., slide transition animation) to the course.
• Write to motivate your learners!
• Use only relevant photos, line-drawings, etc. for graphics that will truly help the learner understand a concept that is described on the page.
• Make sure that if you are importing copyrighted material into your course, that you have gotten permission from the author and that you have cited them in the ALT tag for that graphic/material.
• Make sure that you build-in good interactivity with your practice sessions.
• Use color sparingly. Make sure your colors are non-dithered and web safe.
• Make sure your student exercises correlate with what the student will be doing on the job.
• Learners can only consume logically organized and grouped information. "Chunking" or "sequencing" content is crucial to creating intuitive learning.
• Think about doing some collaborative sessions with your students, using Adobe® Connect™ Meeting, such as an introduction to the course, a web lecture, question and answer session, etc.
• List objectives for lessons and topics within the course. This helps learners know what they should be learning from the lesson or topic.
• Always call quizzes "assessments"! The word, "Quiz" has a negative connotation.
• Always give positive and complete feedback when a learner doesn't answer a assessment question correctly; for example, "A better choice would have been... because ...". Don't embarrass the student with a phrase like "INCORRECT and YOU'RE A DWEEB"! Even "Incorrect!" is somewhat blaring!
• Do give lots of links to excellent course-related materials.
• Do make job-aid handouts (such as checklists, etc.) that the learner can download and use when they back on the job.
• Keep navigation simple.
• Avoid using True/False questions on assessments. These types of questions have a 50% "guess" rate! If you must use True/False questions in your course, write them so that the learner has to actually think about the answer, not guess it.
• Allow students to retake assessments.
• Think about using an Electronic Bulletin Board so that students can chat with each other and you, the instructor, about the course. Adult learners like to interact with one another and share their experiences.

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