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Course Planning

Course Development Tools

To assist in the course development process, the CTRL's Instructional Designers have created the following toolkit. The items available in this toolkit include a course development map, a list of best practices in accessibility design, and a style guide for consistency in design and organization. These documents may be helpful when planning a new course or revising an existing course.

Online Course Development Map

The CTRL's Course Development Map is designed to help instructors create course content around the learning objectives of the course. Using a flow chart, it visualizes the course design process using backwards design. The Map also includes structured outlines for creating and keeping track of assessments, grade distribution, and learning modules.


Online Course Accessibility Design

The Online Course Accessibility Design sheet includes information on best practices for making a course accessible for most users. When developing a course, all effort should be made to design it in a way that is accessible for all learners.

This resource covers accessibility guidelines for including the following things in your course design process:

  • Highlighting
  • Text formatting and document organization
  • Navigation and links
  • Images and graphics
  • Alt text
  • Tables
  • Backgrounds and color
  • CSS

Style Guide

This Style Guide lists the best formats to use for uploading images, video content, documents, and PowerPoint, and also includes a universal standard naming convention to use when uploading content to your course. Using these standards cuts down on errors students may encounter when accessing or downloading content in a course.