Designing for Online Learning: Wayfinding

Designing for Online Learning: Wayfinding is a one-week course for educators who want to learn how to build engaging, navigable, and student-centered online learning experiences. Based on one module from our Designing for Online Learning course, this course will guide participants through a deeper dive into design principles that support high-quality online learning.

Wayfinding is the practice of designing pathways and cues that help a person navigate a complex system on their own. When content and material is organized in a way that minimizes distractions, communicates learning goals and tasks effectively, and anticipates student needs, online learning experiences can empower students to drive their own learning. This course is an opportunity to practice those skills.

The course has four modules:

1. Introduction: How to define wayfinding for in-person and online spaces.
2. Making Goal-Driven Decisions: How to plan module design around transparent learning goals, foundational assessments, and key content.
3. Pacing and Navigation: How to organize content and assessments in a way that empowers students to lead their own learning.
4. Instructions and Page Design: How to communicate intention and expectations in a way that is clear, helpful, and supportive of student learning.

This is a hands-on online course. Participants who bring an existing unit (or idea of one) to this course will benefit the most, as each module asks them to begin the work of building that unit online. The design skills participants learn in this course can be applied to Learning Management Systems (LMS), collaborative documents (like Google Docs), or websites and wikipages. Participants should have access to at least one of these tools.

The course has three main outcomes:

• Participants will understand the relationship between cognitive load theory and instructional design.
• Participants will use principles of backwards design to plan a multimodal online unit or module that includes synchronous and asynchronous elements.
• Participants will practice making essential ingredients of high-quality online learning experiences, including pacing guides, basic videos, and module/page architecture.