Develop Your First Self-Paced Online Course

Course description

The world has changed in the last couple of years, hasn’t it? Confined in our houses, we have learned to use the internet for many ordinary activities beyond what we had previously imagined. For many of us, this has also become a chance to consider online learning and training as a real opportunity. But…

… have you ever considered creating your own self-paced online course?

Self-paced online courses can effectively support traditional school education. They can cover secondary topics you don’t have the time to teach during the school year; or they can provide additional examples and explanations, thus assisting your students in learning from home.

Online materials for self-paced study can also complement a teaching strategy based on flipped education. Finally, you may like the idea to create an online course just to address a community of people having an interest in common with you, and share your expertise with them!

This course will provide you with the necessary capacities to manage your self-paced online course in a Learning Management System such as Moodle, and create appealing visual content (presentations and videos).

The course draws on all the experience that we at Europass Teacher Academy have gathered in the last two years, while creating more than 30 self-paced online courses. As a participant, you will acquire novel digital competencies and skills with a very practical approach.

By the end of the course, you will have designed and developed the essential structure of your own project for a self-paced online course… and you’ll be ready to use your new digital expertise in your everyday (online) teaching with your school students.

Course structure

Topic 1: Learning Management Systems & Moodle

This module will clarify how you can upload a course online using a Learning Management System. For this purpose, it will propose to you to use Moodle (a LMS distributed with open access license), and explain how to create and navigate a course in it, and add modules and contents.

Topic 2: Create text presentations with PowerPoint

This module will teach you how to prepare the basic structure of your learning materials by creating presentations in PowerPoint. You will learn the most basic features of PowerPoint, and we will define some basic specifics that any good-quality presentation should respect.

Topic 3: From text presentations to textless presentations

This module focuses on graphic presentations, i.e., presentations where images play a more central role. You will learn how to use visual communication effectively in your presentations, and to reduce the importance of text.

Topic 4: From textless presentations to educational video clips

This module will provide a few hints on how to create video clips that you can propose to your students for studying at home. It will present the difference between recording and screencasting, and suggest using the latter to create most of your online learning materials. Finally, it will refer you to a few free online applications that you can use to record and edit your videos.