Developing an Online Course

Faculty who are planning on developing a fully online course should begin the process early. Best Practices for online course development recommend a 5 month development timeline. Ideally, a course should be fully developed prior to releasing it to students. That’s not to say that adjustments and additions can’t be made along the way. It is simply advised to avoid being in a situation where you are building a course while teaching it at the same time. Attempting to stay “a module ahead” of your students will most likely lead to a very frustrating and stressful experience particularly when developing and teaching your first online course.

The staff of the Teaching Resource Center is available to assist faculty every step of the way during the design, development, and delivery of online, blended, and web-supplemented courses. We have created a sample timeline that faculty can follow to facilitate the process of development and ensure that the resulting course is functionally sound and of high quality. Please download the Online Course Development Timeline document and make an appointment with an Instructional Designer. For additional information regarding the role of the Instructional Designer in the course development process, please see the What is an Instructional Designer and Why Would I Need One? in the Support for Online Faculty area of this website.

Interested in learning more about online teaching? Make an appointment with an Instructional Designer, who will review with you the considerations and opportunities of online teaching and learning.

Interested in taking the next step toward teaching an online, blended or web-supplemented course? Below are the next steps you need to take to make that happen!
Please note: You must be logged in to your faculty Gmail account to access the forms below.

Step 1: Complete the required Brightspace training if you have not already done so.  Please see our Accessing the SUNY CPD’s Asynchronous Brightspace Training page for more information.Step 2: Make an appointment with an Instructional Designer.

Step 3:  Develop your course. New courses are built in development shells rather than in an actual live course. Brightspace development course shells can be requested using this Brightspace Development Shell Request Form.

Step 4: Copy your content into your semester shell (the one that is connected to your student roster in Banner) and enable it to students!