With the growing educational technology, online teaching platforms are also increasing rapidly. The better flexibility, convenience, comfort, cost-effectiveness effectiveness, and other such benefits offered to make online courses the new preference of educators and learners. To make an online course successful, the main component to work upon is your online course study material.
The more effective the quality of your online course study material, the better will be the content delivery and the more will be course sales. So online course creators along with researching the platform to sell courses online must plan and produce quality study material for the respective course. Let us discuss the qualities of ideal online study material. Keeping these qualities in mind, you can design a perfect one for your course learners.
Qualities of an Ideal online course study material
-
It should be understandable
The first quality of ideal online study material is that it should be understandable to students. The online course builder should use simple language to make study material that is easy and understandable for learners throughout. Sophisticated words, higher-level information, and complex English should not be used. The course content should be easy to process, grab and capture in mind. The better the understanding of the study material, the more will be the learning outcomes.
-
Must be engaging for learners
In online learning, students sometimes feel isolated and lonely as interactions with teachers and batchmates are limited. In such cases, study material should keep students engaged throughout the course. To keep students engaged in learning, the course content should be appealing and interesting. Teachers can include audio-visual elements like educational videos, infographics, picture cards, PowerPoint presentations, and more to make engaging study material.
1. It should be easy to access
No matter how effective or rich in quality the online course content is, if it is difficult to access, it’s of no use for learners. Ideal online course material should be in bite-sized portions and easy to access. The course content should be uploaded on the website or on the education app, from where students can have the right access. The course material should be designed in such a way that it is mobile-friendly. When students can access the course study material via mobile, it offers them great flexibility to learn from anywhere and at any time.
-
Relevant and specific
Learning via computer or mobile screens is already challenging for many students and if teachers will share too much information with students, it can become difficult for them to understand and process. Ideal online study material should be relevant and specific. The teachers should not dive into the topic and must share only relevant portions with students. The lessons, videos, and notes should not be less or more than the course curriculum. To the point and specific information must be delivered to students.
Important Elements of an online course study material
2. Educational videos
One of the most important study components that must be there in your online course is the educational videos. In online courses, physical interactions with teachers are not possible, and in asynchronous mode, not even real-time meet-ups. So educational videos are the tools that help learners to feel the instructor’s presence, and stay actively involved with learning.
The audio and visual elements in videos provide students with a proper understanding. Using online teaching apps and sites, teachers can access several educational videos or they can also make personalized ones by having a proper plan, information to share, and the right equipment like cameras, recorders, tripods, etc.
3. Reading PDFs
Other than watching educational videos, having some written information in hand is always important. The old school learning method of reading, underlining the main terms, and memorizing will never go out. So online course creators should also make reading PDFs for students. Also, instead of making one huge pdf of the whole course, divide it into smaller portions. Smaller pdf files become easy to access and become less hectic for learners. Include the terms, definitions, and detailed explanation of all the topics in the reading PDFs.
4. Online quizzes
Other than watching the videos, and modules and reading the PDFs, something to practice and solve should also be there. To do so, the online course material must have online quizzes. These quizzes will help students to know how much they have understood, what is their learning status and what more needs to be done for improvement. Online quizzes can be made in a form format, including questions like tick the correct option, answer in one word, true or false, fill in the blanks, and more.
Conclusion
For effective online teaching and learning, working to make an ideal study material holds utmost importance. By reading the above-mentioned information we can make out the qualities of an ideal online course study material. Online quizzes, reading PDFs, educational videos, video lectures, presentations, and ebooks are some of the effective elements that should be included in the online course study material.