Implement

In the Create section, you did most of the theoretical course development. Once you have a clear idea what you want to accomplish, it’s time to put it into the format you’ll use. At this point, you can create videos, implement assessments, set up your groups, and do all that other fun stuff.

Some overall implementation advice:

• Do not try to immediately create a beautiful, final, finished product.
  Instead, implement a rough version that contains all of the major material. Don’t polish the writing; don’t do final edits on the videos. Keep in mind that the next step is to pilot your course to see how well it works with an audience. When you do that, you will discover things you will want to change. Make sure your schedule allows you to do so and that you haven’t made such a big investment in certain parts of your implementation that you cannot afford to redo them when you discover that you need to.
• Separate basic from advanced material.
  Design the primary flow of your material for the middle ground: Not too easy and not too hard. You may decide that there is extra material that you want available to students at either end of the spectrum. You can put extra material in a variety of places, as discussed in Announcements and Optional Material.
• Online students don’t give you the feedback you’re used to.
  When you can see your students, as in a live class, you have a huge amount of input to guide what you do. You can see where they’re interested, where they get bored, and where they’re confused. However, for an online course, you create all of the course material and decide on the exact delivery before you deliver it; you cannot change it on the fly. You get no feedback from your students to allow you to adjust the content. The most you can do is interact with your students using the mechanisms discussed in Community Discussion and Announcements and Optional Material. You can also collect data to help improve future versions of the course.
• Take heart.
  If you’re an experienced classroom teacher, you know that in a class of 30, there’s usually one troublemaker, one student who progresses slowly, and one student who progresses quickly. If your course reaches 30,000 students, that one troublemaker becomes 1,000 troublemakers, and so on. Keep your perspective. It’s still the same phenomenon.

Find your course platform and build your course

The implementation step of your road to online education success is primarily determined by the course-delivery platform you use. Follow the development and implementation steps outlined by that platform's documentation, if you are using one other than Course Builder.