Overview

Meet UT's School of Architecture Associate Professor, Matt Fajkus Links to an external site., the recipient of multiple awards for his innovation in both teaching and architecture. In the video that accompanies this overview, he describes the parallels between designing a building and designing a course.

This set of resources is comprised of five modules, each presenting a different element of the online architecting process. You can pick and choose, but we recommend getting a richer experience by working through them sequentially as a course.

Each module consists of two primary pages: "thinking" and "doing." The first page will help you think about the what and the why, and the second page will show you how other UT instructors have used these strategies to increase student learning. Each module has a worksheet to help guide you through the process of building each element of your online course as well as a growing collection of resources.

Module One: The "big picture" can help you think about your course map for your online course, which helps you communicate to your students what they should have learned by the end of the course.
Module Two: Frequent, low stakes assessment of your students allows you to communicate your expectations while keeping students on track, responding to feedback and helping them succeed.
Module Three: Whether you curate or create, you need to ensure that your course content is designed to communicate effectively and efficiently in an online context.
Module Four: Connecting with your students in online courses is all about using technology to find new ways to foster communication, both between you and your students and among students.
Module Five: The way you put everything together communicates to students the relationships between course concepts and provides logical pathways to build student understanding.