Welcome to our collection on creating better course content. We have a whole range of resources to help you in your course design and they exist in a few different formats and fall under a few different categories. So, we've created this one-pager to collate them all in one place for you.

"Failing to plan is planning to fail." Using the planning steps below will help you refine your solution, focus on what's really needed and create learning that actually delivers. Check out these articles for our key planning steps.

There are lots of different ways we've tried to save authors and organisations time by encouraging reuse.

Sometimes it's knowing where to start that's the hardest. With that in mind, we've created a whole range of templates for you to use as a starting point for your own courses. Check out iQualify templates for a brief description of each template available.

As well as copying our templates, you can also copy your own content in a range of ways. For instance you can copy a task to use later in the same course, starr a page to copy anywhere, or share courses between organisations. Check out Overview of content reuse and sharing for the whole list of ways you can re-use course content and save time.

Focused courses are better all round, they require less in terms of development time and resources, and they are more focused for learners.

Getting bang for your buck in online training is a good starting point for thinking about how doing less is better for everyone.

Then, when you're designing, use backwards design to make sure you're only including content and tasks that actually help learners achieve the outcomes.

When the content is written, check out Cut down that content for tips on how to further focus your course (and learners' time) by trimming that word count - say more, write less.

Finally, when your own eyes are tired of reviewing the content, use these tools/sites to help improve your writing and spot what you can't see anymore.

In our article on Course design principles from cognitive science, we talk about dual coding and how we can use what we know about how the brain works to improve our courses. Below are a few of the principles.

Start by giving learners less stuff to organise.

Then, with the content you have left, be sure to Chunk the content to support learning by breaking down topics into page-sized chunks and organise things (both grouping and ordering) in a way that makes sense for learners brains.

Activate prior knowledge to support learning by creating mental hooks and frameworks. This helps learners to recall and use concepts by giving them something to hang new knowledge on.

You can also use graphic organisers for concept structures to help learners figure out where to store related things.

Be sure to include Tasks for regular retrieval to help learners remember key information. And help learners better understand concepts by including tasks that get them to elaborate on what they know to make it stick (getting it into their long term memory).

Our resources on active learning below further extend the idea of supporting learner encoding.

There's much more to teaching than telling. And there's much more to learning than reading, watching or listening.

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn...” - John Dewey

Our blog post Active learning introduces active learning and explains why it works.

Then check out our articles for different task ideas depending on whether you want to help learners with simple retrieval practice, sorting and ranking, or comparing and contrasting.

For even more ideas, see Many way with tasks which introduces a method for making ideas and includes a "cheat sheet" with ideas to get you unstuck.

Sometimes when people opt for blended learning they just means sometimes online, sometimes not. But ideally online and face-to-face components will rely or build on one another.

If you're interested in the different models you might use for blended learning, check out Blended learning in iQualify. It outlines six common "flavours" of blended learning and links to a separate article on each, chock full of examples taken from our blended learning templates.

We also have a whole collection of articles with Ideas for blended learning on how you can make sure your online course is integrated with your face to face classes and activities.

In learning, online communities can motivate learners and improve outcomes. In iQualify these social spaces can take the form of talk channels, in-page discussions (built by the author) or social notes.

But we need to ensure these spaces lead to better learning and aren’t just “noise”.

So we've come up with a progression of tiers that increase in complexity and level of interaction with others: Building an online community.

This article links out to further articles on each tier with example discussion activities.

When asking learners to contribute to social elements as part of a course, it's best to start with low stakes activities that allow learners to explore and encourage them to have a voice.

Once learners have dipped their toes in, we want them to actually interact. Read Stop asking learners to post once and reply twice which focuses on getting engagement and conversation in a discussion. And, if you liked that article, sign up to our Designing and facilitating online discussions Skills course. It covers the ideas and techniques in a lot more detail with examples to help.

That's our current collection of resources to support you in furthering your online course design. If you have other ideas for resources, please get in touch. We'd love to help!