Designing for Online Learning

Welcome to the Designing for Online Learning website! This tool was created to accompany Horizon's Designing for Online Learning professional development course, but we also hope that it will be useful to you in your ongoing growth as a course designer.

We have collected posts on this website into three categories: Engagement, Technology, and Learning. The engagement category contains posts about the elements and principles of design, as well as posts about putting it all together. The technology category contains posts about tools and tasks related to online learning technology. The learning category contains posts about learning principles that are helpful for course designers. The learning posts are further divided into subcategories: Understanding Learners, Understanding Learning, Learning Pathways, Backward Design and Developing Content.

We believe that the organizational structure we've chosen for this website is a useful learning tool to help you think about course design. You can see an outline of the categories and subcategories in our sitemap. You can also see them in the menu at the top of the page. Once you click onto any page, if you go back up to look at the menu, the current page you are on will be highlighted so you can easily peruse other pages in the category that might be related to the topic you are interested in.

If you'd like to read offline, you are welcome to use this PDF version of the articles (last updated 27 July 2021). Note that the latest posts may not be included.