The Effects of Online Course Design on Student Course Satisfaction

The quality of course design and organization often affects student success in the classroom as much as a student's ability to learn and apply course material. Students frequently must overcome poorly organized classes, including those organized within Learning Management Systems (LMSs) such as Blackboard. Ideally, instructors utilize LMSs and similar learning portals to optimize the amount of knowledge transfer, while minimizing the time students need to reach subject proficiency and the time instructors need to administer and to assess students. For example, searching for misleadingly labeled documents by navigating folders within folders can stress students and cause negative instructor reviews. We relate this to issues with "signal – to – noise ratio addressed in a previous work. Lamentably, while institutions of higher education regularly survey students for course feedback, a critical component most often missing is student user feedback on how well course design and organization contributed to the learning process. Based on a review of the literature, and previous experience, we developed multiple preliminary course structures that considered folder organization, the number of tabs to include, and kind of Blackboard features to use. We then recommend several easy to follow practices to help instructors improve their online course design to improve student learning and retention.