Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course

Structure and Content

Kateryna V. Vlasenko

1,2 a

, Irina V. Sitak

3 b

, Daria A. Kovalenko

3 c

, Sergii V. Volkov

3 d

Iryna V. Lovianova

4 e

, Serhiy O. Semerikov

4,5,6,7 f

and Serhiy L. Zahrebelnyi

8 g

Department of Mathematics, National University of “Kyiv Mohyla Academy”, 2 Hryhoriya Skovorody Str., Kyiv, 04655,

Ukraine

Technical University “Metinvest Polytechnic” LLC, 71A Sechenov Str., Mariupol, 87524, Ukraine

Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, 59A Tsentralnyi Ave., Severodonetsk, 93400, Ukraine

Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, 54 Gagarin Ave., Kryvyi Rih, 50086, Ukraine

Kryvyi Rih National University, 11 Vitalii Matusevych Str., Kryvyi Rih, 50027, Ukraine

Institute of Information Technologies and Learning Tools of the NAES of Ukraine, 9 M. Berlynskoho Str., Kyiv, 04060,

Ukraine

University of Educational Management, 52A Sichovykh Striltsiv Str., Kyiv, 04053, Ukraine

Donbas State Engineering Academy, 7 Academic Str., Kramatorsk, 84313, Ukraine

Keywords:

Online-Course, Methodical Recommendations, Content, Educational Materials.

Abstract:

The article looks into the matter of developing methodical recommendations for the structure and content of

online courses. The research is dedicated to the analysis of peculiarities of developing the content of online sys-

tems and developing methodical recommendations for educational materials of online courses. The research

considers the experts’ experience in preparing, structuring, and developing the content of online courses and

answers to the volunteers who have agreed to test the educational materials of the course “Methods for Teach-

ing Mathematics to Students in Technical Universities” http://formathematics.com/courses/imt/mnmtzvo-en/.

The participants’ responses have allowed evaluating the quality of the developed course and detecting its in-

signiﬁcant drawbacks. The article discusses general requirements for the structure and content of the online

course, means for the implementation of a testing subsystem, peculiarities of developing educational video

content and educational materials in PDF format, issues of implementing forum and survey subsystems, as

well as means of assessing learning outcomes. We have grounds to conclude that the quality of the course is

determined by the range of factors, among which we point out the course organization based on weekly plan-

ning, implementation of a testing subsystem under conditions of extended functionality, creation of abilities

to organize feedback.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8920-5680

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2593-1293

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1362-9241

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7938-3080

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3186-2837

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0789-0272

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6246-4519

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Problem Statement and Its

Topicality Substantiation

The emergence of available web-technologies has

dramatically changed the approaches to communica-

tion and education. The access to the Internet and

the variety of gadgets that allow this access led to

the demand for educational services that adapt to the

needs of learning during life ensuring the personal-

ization of the learning process. Such demand en-

Vlasenko, K., Sitak, I., Kovalenko, D., Volkov, S., Lovianova, I., Semerikov, S. and Zahrebelnyi, S.

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content.

DOI: 10.5220/0010925300003364

In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology (AET 2020) - Volume 1, pages 471-485

ISBN: 978-989-758-558-6

471

couraged the creation of the educational trend – the

development of open educational online-platforms.

The implementation of the idea of open online edu-

cation requires the development of recommendations

both as technical and methodical support of online

courses. Thanks to them a considerable number of

people can increase their qualiﬁcation or develop pro-

fessional expertise. Supporting the idea of accessible

educational opportunities, we have studied experts’

experience in preparing educational materials. By

implementing numerous recommendations concern-

ing the preparation, structuring, and development of

the content for online courses, Writing and Structur-

ing Online Learning Materials (Leicester Learning In-

stitute, 2019), DIGICOMP (DIGICOMP, 2015) and

Leicester Learning Institute (Leicester Learning Insti-

tute, 2020) remind us that we live a life of constant

changes and these changes have to inﬂuence teach-

ing and learning. To implement these changes in the

system of online education, we have to provide educa-

tional materials that meet students’ expectations. This

means that giving learners the possibility to acquire

some particular skills via online courses requires se-

rious training. Therefore, the topicality of the issue to

develop methodical recommendations for the struc-

ture and content of online courses is not questionable.

1.2 Literature Review

To determine recommendations for developing an on-

line course, we have studied practical recommenda-

tions by FAO (FAO, 2021) who considers that the de-

velopment of any course has to encourage the creation

of practitioners’ community and support their will-

ingness to cooperate. While planning the develop-

ment of the materials necessary for the implementa-

tion of particular types of work we paid our attention

to the possibility to plan the achievement of educa-

tional progress. At the stage of planning the aims, we

were focused on the concept of the platform “Higher

School Mathematics Teacher” (formathematics.com,

2021), developed by Vlasenko et al. (Vlasenko et al.,

2019a). Taking into account scientists’ opinion while

preparing the curriculum we were focused on the

achievable goals, believing that the students’ achieve-

ment of aims regularly will encourage their motiva-

tion to aspire to more. While developing the lec-

tures we were interested in the researches conducted

by Dommeyer et al. (Dommeyer et al., 2004), Dem-

ing et al. (Deming et al., 2015), Bauer (Bauer, 2019),

who describe in their works the improvement of lec-

ture materials using the survey of the respondents who

work with courses. Cruse (Cruse, 2019), Suduc et al.

(Suduc et al., 2010), Suduc et al. (Suduc et al., 2012)

recommend giving video lectures. Conﬁrming the ef-

ﬁciency of using videos in the educational process,

among the greatest advantages of its use the scien-

tists emphasize the possibility of course participants

to learn the material according to their pace of assim-

ilating the educational materials. Moreover, in sci-

entists’ works, there is evidence that video content

ensures a greater emotional impact on participants in

comparison to the text-based one. Developing tests

that according to Suwatthipong et al. (Suwatthipong

et al., 2015) have to accompany learning theoretical

materials we considered scientists’ opinion that test-

ing should both help to assess the progress level while

assimilating the educational material and help to ac-

quire new knowledge. Being acquainted with the re-

search in which Wrigley et al. (Wrigley et al., 2018)

compared the content quality of Massive Open Online

Courses, we concluded that while developing course

materials it is necessary to evenly distribute labor in-

tensity of students’ learning activities by weeks, pro-

viding the interaction among the participants. Fur-

thermore, we took into consideration the results of the

research by J

onsson (J

onsson, 2005), Vlasenko et al.

(Vlasenko et al., 2020e), where it is justiﬁed that the

efﬁcient online course includes the integration of var-

ious web tools (Vlasenko et al., 2020e) and resources

for learning the course material.

Thus, giving recommendations for the presenta-

tion of educational materials during online courses,

every scientist stated that there should be a speciﬁc

approach for the development and certain nuances

should be considered. So, the article is aimed at

carrying out a theoretical analysis of peculiarities

of the existing online systems and the development

of methodological recommendations for the develop-

ment of structure and content of online courses on the

platform “Higher School Mathematics Teacher” (for-

mathematics.com, 2021).

2 METHOD

The analysis of the content on open educational plat-

forms, the world experience of implementing online

learning, the synthesis of the results after such an

analysis, and our own experience allowed forming

methodological recommendations for the preparation

of online courses.

We have surveyed master students (the qualiﬁca-

tion code of the program “014.04. Secondary Ed-

ucation. Mathematics”) and higher school mathe-

matics teachers to ﬁnd out the quality of educational

materials for the online course “Methods for Teach-

ing Mathematics to Students in Technical Univer-

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

472

sities”, published on the platform “Higher School

Mathematics Teacher” (Lovianova et al., 2021). The

theoretical analysis of the researches and resources

that implement the recommendations, content struc-

turing and development of online courses, analysis

of respondents’ answers to the survey questions pub-

lished on the platform forum has inﬂuenced the de-

scription of the methodical recommendations for the

structure and content of online courses. To explore

the resources, we analyzed the structure and content

of the most popular Massive Open Online Courses

(MOOC). When selecting resources, we focused on

the online courses (LinkedIn, 2019; Udemy, 2019;

Coursera, 2019; EdX, 2019; FutureLearn, 2019) in-

cluded in the Top Tools for Learning 2019 ( Centre

for Learning & Performance Technologies, 2021).

Having analyzed the resources, we found several

sections that the online courses include and the av-

erage course duration. We were eager to know how

often titles are offered and what the purpose of testing

in courses is. We have highlighted the peculiarities of

video lectures, training materials in PDF format. Par-

ticular attention was paid to the organization of the

course process and feedback from students. Through

content analysis, we have developed methodological

recommendations for the development of structure

and content of online courses on the platform “Higher

School Mathematics Teacher” (formathematics.com,

2021).

2.1 The Presentation of the Course

Taking into Account the

Peculiarities of an Online

Presentation

At the beginning of education on open online plat-

forms, the user should clearly understand how they

will learn and what material they will work with.

Following the recommendations of dividing on-

line course content into sections, subsections (topics),

pages, and components (Vlasenko et al., 2020d), we

concluded that the construction of an online course

should be based on weekly planning, where sections

are formed on the principle of combining materials

that are learned during one or several weeks.

We have also considered that educational method-

ical online courses have to include no more than 6

sections. Every section has to include one or more

pages; the page has no more than one component.

For instance, the online course “Methods for Teaching

Mathematics to Students in Technical Universities”,

published on the platform “Higher School Mathe-

matics Teacher” (Lovianova et al., 2021), includes

three sections with three topics for each one. At the

same time, the course “Project Method in Teaching

Higher Mathematics” (Kondratieva et al., 2019) in-

cludes 6 sections with 2 topics for each (ﬁgure 1), and

the course “Personal E-learning Environment of the

Maths Teacher” (Vlasenko et al., 2019b) has 5 sec-

tions with 2 topics for each (ﬁgure 2).

The number of sections and topics depends on the

course volume and the preliminary survey of teachers

and students (course users) who help to determine the

course structure.

2.2 Structuring

Before creating the course it is necessary to have a

clear understanding of the course’s target audience,

main needs, and peculiarities of this audience. So, tu-

tors have to determine the aims of learning and antic-

ipated results, subject, structure, assessment criteria,

and organization of feedback. It signiﬁcantly inﬂu-

ences the content and structure of the course. More-

over, it is necessary to consider when and how the

course users will learn. Also, it should be considered

how often it is needed to update the learning material,

how much time the tutor will spend on the organiza-

tion of education and feedback. If there has to be a

signiﬁcant number of users, it is necessary to think

about the automatization of these processes.

The structure of the course should be logical,

clear, intuitively understandable. While creating the

course the following points should be considered:

1) the learning material of the course has to be di-

vided into logical sections, or according to the

topics (ﬁgure 3), or of a particular length to learn

it during 1-2 hours ( typical learning class);

2) the headings of sections, topics, and subtopics

should be well formulated, it will help users to

plan which sections they will work over at every

class, and will allow them to skip topics that they

already know;

3) before providing the material for every new topic

or section it is necessary to give a review of the

coming material, its structure, results of learning,

and approximate time of learning, it is relevant to

give such material in form of a short video;

4) pretesting or ﬁnal testing after learning a particu-

lar topic or section can be conducted on request.

The ﬁrst three recommendations were considered

during the development of all the courses of the plat-

form (formathematics.com, 2021). The online course

“Methods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in

Technical Universities” (Lovianova et al., 2021) in-

cludes both the pretesting on Higher Mathematics and

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content

473

Figure 1: Structure of the course “Project Method in Teaching Higher Mathematics”.

the ﬁnal course testing. Pretesting is included in the

course as it is impossible to succeed during the test

without learning the corresponding sections of Higher

Mathematics.

2.3 Features of Writing

The educational materials should be taught in an ac-

cessible and clear form. Taking into account the

peculiarities of perceiving the electronic information

(Kondratieva et al., 2019), the material that will be

posted in the electronic format should be 50% shorter

than the analog, printed one. Therefore, more tables,

schemes, corresponding examples, and researches on

a particular subject should be used. Additional mate-

rial should be given as a hyperlink or a separate doc-

ument.

Besides, it is necessary to explain every new def-

inition or term. It can be a context tooltip, footnote,

hyperlink, etc. Also, it is relevant to create a separate

glossary for every section or topic.

To give the main theoretical information on the

topics during the online course, we use educational

materials in PDF format that ensures compatibility

and absence of distortions in published materials of

the course. Moreover, using PDF format allows

the participants to download educational materials

to their proper computers for a further acquaintance

without any preview on the web-page (Panchenko

et al., 2020).

While creating educational materials in PDF for-

mat it’s necessary to follow the requirements for pre-

senting documents: to use headings, lists, images with

sighs, to represent table data in the form of tables. To

type text material the direct (regular) font, which en-

sures easier perception of information, should mainly

be used. The main text should be aligned to the page

width. It is not recommended to use formatting with

the help of indent and tabulation, multi-column page

making, blank line. While using hyperlinks it is nec-

essary to consider that all hyperlinks should be repre-

sented as a text in the sentence to increase readability.

For instance, the course “Differential Equations”

(Sitak, 2018) widely uses hyperlinks and popup notes

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474

Figure 2: Structure of the course “Personal E-learning Environment of the Maths Teacher”.

(ﬁgure 4), while the course “Operations Research-

Oriented to Cloud Computing in the System CoCalc”

(Bobyliev et al., 2020) offers smaller documents in

PDF-format that can be downloaded by students for

further use.

2.4 Bright Presentation of Material

To attract attention to online courses and support stu-

dents’ interest it is relevant to use all the possible

means of material delivery – animation, video, multi-

colored unusual fonts, footnotes, popup tooltips. The

relevance of using the side framework to add informa-

tion is proven.

If it is necessary to publish a considerable amount

of educational material directly on the page of the on-

line course, it should be “divided” into parts following

the screen size, the navigation and hyperlink system

should be organized and an additional PDF-version to

store and print the learning material should be created.

The necessity to do group tasks, analyze and as-

sess other course participants’ work adds up to the

users’ interest and will encourage the regular analysis

of the learning material and periodical review. While

giving the material it is relevant to repeat the key con-

cepts, ideas, and theories several times in different

forms (if it is possible).

According to the recommendations, materials of

the online courses “Project Method in Teaching

Higher Mathematics” (Vlasenko et al., 2020c), “Per-

sonal E-learning Environment of the Maths Teacher”

(Vlasenko et al., 2020a), “Methods for Teaching

Mathematics to Students in Technical Universities”

(Lovianova et al., 2021), published on the platform

“Higher School Mathematics Teacher” (formathemat-

ics.com, 2021) are given using video ﬁles, hypertext,

demonstrative animation, audio lectures, video lec-

tures, schemes, images, graphics, tables, drawings,

information reference material (ﬁgure 5). Also, pre-

sentations and other extra materials such as attached

ﬁles and interactive supplements, sources that are

given in the reference list, are used.

We use video content to get participants ac-

quainted with the aims and resources of the course

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content

475

Figure 3: Sections of the course “Methods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Technical Universities”.

as well as highlight particular topics. Video lectures

focus on the main moments of learning material, dis-

close the topic of the material, and summarize the

main conclusions. While creating video lectures it

is expected to highlight semantic blocks (video clips)

lasting from 3 to 10 minutes that will be watched by

the participants during the online course. The image

should be high-quality, the text that is demonstrated

on the slides should be available for reading from the

mobile device screen. Pure sound requires minimal

background noise, clear pronunciation of words, and a

stable level of volume. While creating video lectures

it is preferable to use the universal format of video

ﬁles MP4.

To create videos during the online course “Meth-

ods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Tech-

nical Universities” (Lovianova et al., 2021), we used

software Camtasia which implements capturing the

video from the screen. Among the main functional

abilities of this video editor, which is used while de-

veloping educational video, we can highlight provid-

ing the recording of the image from the screen includ-

ing recording sound effects from the microphone or

speakers and editing a new video without installing

additional software.

To publish video content on the pages of the online

course, we used the video from the ﬁle directly on the

administrator’s panel of the electronic platform with-

out involving extra services. Using such a method of

integration ensures the possibility to control the size

of the video player and to add extra settings.

2.5 Organization of the Learning

Outcome Assessment

While developing the course special attention is paid

to the creation of a system to assess the learning re-

sults. It can be a constant assessment such as tests and

or completing control tasks with saved results (such a

system encourages the constant interest in the course

completion). It is possible to use the ﬁnal test on the

formed competencies such as certiﬁed testing or qual-

iﬁed work. Let’s mention that such an assessment

method requires special students’ motivation for test

completion.

The course developer has to indicate how much

time they need to check the tasks if there were given,

when, and how the student can get a certiﬁcate or an-

other learning result.

For example, in order to implement the testing

subsystem on the platform “Higher School Mathe-

matics Teacher” (formathematics.com, 2021) a pro-

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

476

Figure 4: Popup notes in the course “Differential Equations”.

gram application for extending functionality was used

– the plugin “WP-Pro-Quiz” that ensures ﬂexible set-

tings of the responses options and provides related in-

formation.

While creating test questions it is stipulated that

information about the number of points for the right

answer is provided and the type of answer (single

choice, multiple-choice, open choice, etc.) is indi-

cated. Also, there is a possibility to add hints to a par-

ticular question. After creating and setting up the test

it is possible to publish it on any page of the online

course using special shortcodes.

For instance, for the online course “Differential

Equations” (Sitak, 2018), the test is considered passed

in case of giving 60% of the right answers by the

participant. After the test, the participant can look

through the number of right answers and time spent

on taking it.

An important element while developing an online

course is using surveys that enable the teacher to ask

participants questions and offer a wide range of pos-

sible answers. While creating a survey the teacher

describes a certain situation and formulates a ques-

tion encouraging participants to express their opinion.

The ﬁnal result of the survey is the percentage of the

participants who chose one or another response.

During the course “Methods for teaching math-

ematics to students in technical universities” (Lo-

vianova et al., 2021), “Personal E-learning Environ-

ment of the Maths Teacher” (Vlasenko et al., 2019b),

“Creative Thinking Through Learning Elementary

Maths” (Achkan et al., 2020), etc. surveys are cre-

ated with the help of the service Google Forms and

are used as voting for theme selection as well as for

discussion over course materials (ﬁgure 6, ﬁgure 7).

The choice of Google Forms as a tool for creating

surveys is explained by the following characteristics:

availability of the created survey for the respondents

just after its publication, possibility to edit it, open-

ing for getting answers, and closing after ﬁnishing

the survey. Furthermore, there is a possibility to in-

tegrate forms for surveys on the online course page.

In order to show the survey results the service gen-

erates automatically the electronic table, there is an

option to review respondents’ answers in the form of

diagrams and graphics with statistical information in

high-quality and percentage format.

In the course “Differential equations” (Sitak,

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content

477

Figure 5: Online course “Project Method in Teaching Higher Mathematics”.

2018) we use the system of tests with the educational

aim, not the knowledge control aim. Students can

pass tests several times and get instructions for the

right answer. Within the course “Methods for Teach-

ing Mathematics to Students in Technical Universi-

ties” (Lovianova et al., 2021), we assume to have peer

assessment to estimate the performance of training ac-

tivities. While using such type of evaluation, we fol-

lowed the recommendations for the development of

the criteria table. We took into account the require-

ments for tasks to be clearly deﬁned and encourage

the author (later reviewer) to pay attention to different

sides of work. The process of writing a piece of work

that corresponds to the requirements and the process

of checking such works is useful for participants, as

it develops skills of giving constructive criticism in-

cluding negative.

For every task, the course tutor developed the eval-

uation criteria with a detailed description of the nec-

essary content on every criterion to get a particular

mark. As a tool we offer to use Google Drive services

to complete the task; it ensures the possibility to store

completed works by implementing shared access to

the documents and Google Forms to implement the

feedback with participants.

Successful learning of the educational material of

the course is completed by getting a certiﬁcate. The

criteria of getting a certiﬁcate are based on criteria-

oriented approach that includes the comparison of

educational achievements of every participant with

planned learning outcomes.

2.6 Feedback Organization

The feedback organization is important both for the

course developers and course participants. The neces-

sity to ask questions and receive responses, discuss

the issue, express recommendations for the course

arises during any education.

The feedback can be organized for every course

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

478

Figure 6: Online course “Methods for teaching mathematics

to students in technical universities”.

separately and the whole online platform. It can be

a discussion page, chat, or forum. It is important to

organize the prompt course tutors’ notiﬁcation about

new questions and messages. Usually, it is necessary

to indicate them in the settings of the corresponding

page/forum. Such an option allows reacting promptly

to the incoming messages.

For example, during the course “Methods for

Teaching Mathematics to Students in Technical

Universities” (Lovianova et al., 2021), “Personal

E-learning Environment of the Maths Teacher”

(Vlasenko et al., 2019b), “Operations Research-

Oriented to Cloud Computing in the System CoCalc”

(Vlasenko et al., 2020b), the feedback with course

participants is organized using thematic forums (ﬁg-

ure 8). Participants’ part in the weekly forum gives

them a possibility to express their proper opinion us-

ing discussion questions that concern the main topics

of the course.

Together with the forum use the organization

of participants’ communication takes place in asyn-

chronous mode, in other words during a long period.

Participants can sign up for the forum to get notiﬁ-

cations about new topics and answers on the forum.

With the help of the forum, there is a participants’ dis-

cussion of their classmates’ works, which is outlined

Figure 7: Online course “Creative Thinking Through Learn-

ing Elementary Maths”.

by one of the course tasks. Furthermore, participants

can use the forum to share examples of their work and

to ask each other questions and the teacher about the

studied topics.

The forum implementation on the platform

“Higher School Mathematics Teacher” (formathemat-

ics.com, 2021) was carried out using the plugin “wp-

Foro” which consists of a set of the main tools for

managing the forum. The main advantages of using

the plugin are ﬂexible settings of the forum presen-

tation, the creation of a convenient user’s proﬁle, and

the possibility to add particular supplements to extend

the functionality.

Besides the forum, teamwork with shared docu-

ments and emails is used for the organization of feed-

back during all the courses.

2.7 Editing and Checking

It is important to remember that any material that

the course developers give students reﬂects the scien-

tist’s qualities or the educational institution that is the

owner of the corresponding open educational online

platform. Thus, all the materials for distance educa-

tion have to be checked in advance. It is relevant to

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content

479

Figure 8: Thematic forum in the course “Methods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Technical Universities”.

carry out the approbation of the educational course as

a pilot project with discussions on the teachers’ fo-

rum and further consideration of remarks and recom-

mendations. Also, an outside review of educational

materials by several users with a different level of

training can be used. Reviewers must be developers’

colleagues, specialists of the corresponding area, lin-

guists, and non trained specialists.

Before publishing the materials it is necessary to

print them and check again. Special attention should

be paid to the observance of copyright, it is impor-

tant to make sure that all the borrowed materials have

authors and references.

It is relevant to develop the course not only in the

ofﬁcial language but in English too so that it allows

increasing the audience of the educational platform

signiﬁcantly.

2.8 Responsiveness

Most users study the course using their phones or

tablets. Therefore, it is important to keep this fact

in mind in the process of course development. Re-

sponsiveness reﬂects the quality and aesthetics of the

system display on mobile devices that have different

resolution. To ensure the responsiveness of the course

design, it is advisable to use methods of presenting the

interface using CSS stylization for individual device

resolutions.

It is important to keep in mind that the menu in-

terface and sidebar elements look different on differ-

ent mobile devices. For a better perception of the

course, the developers will need to adapt the size of

text, headings and subheadings, links, buttons, image

sizes, and other interface elements. Thus, in ﬁgures 9-

10 we can compare the look of the course page “Per-

sonal E-learning Environment of the Maths Teacher”

on a desktop computer and a smartphone.

3 RESULTS

To analyze the correspondence level of the content

during the course “Methods for Teaching Mathemat-

ics to Students in Technical Universities” (Lovianova

et al., 2021) to speciﬁed recommendations of devel-

oping online courses, we held a survey among the

participants. Respondents were offered to answer

the survey questions using the forum on the platform

“Higher School Mathematics Teacher” (formathemat-

ics.com, 2021).

68 volunteers who agreed to test the educational

materials of the course took part in the survey. Partic-

ipants’ answers allowed evaluating the quality of the

developed course and determining minor gaps in the

implementation.

We offered them to range the quality of present-

ing information concerning the structure and seman-

tic content of the online course on a scale from 1 to

5 where 1 is the minimal parameter estimate, 5 is the

maximal one. Table 1 provides the survey results.

The ranking results are presented in the form of a

histogram (ﬁgure 11).

Analyzing the histogram data we concluded that

most volunteers have highly evaluated the structure

and quality of the developed content of online courses

giving 4 or 5 points. In respondents’ opinion present-

ing information concerning the course program, its

duration, and frequency of classes were fulﬁlled most

successfully. Among the types of educational content

materials in PDF format and video lectures got the

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480

Figure 9: Desktop version of the course “Personal E-learning Environment of the Maths Teacher”.

Table 1: Results of testing educational materials of the course “Methods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Technical

Universities”.

Questions

Respondents’ answers

1 2 3 4 5

Accessibility of information presentation concerning the aims and purposes of

the course

5 8 10 27 18

Accessibility of information presentation concerning the duration and fre-

quency of the course

3 4 13 23 25

Accessibility of information presentation concerning the target audience of the

course

6 3 11 28 20

Accessibility of information presentation concerning the course program 1 6 9 25 27

Convenience of the navigation system during the course 8 9 15 24 12

Quality of presenting educational materials as video lectures 1 4 7 29 27

Quality of presenting educational materials in PDF format 2 6 12 23 25

Quality of tests 3 5 14 26 20

Quality of survey implementation among course participants 4 7 16 21 20

Quality of peer-assessment implementation 4 8 14 20 22

Quality of feedback implementation using the weekly forum 5 8 18 19 18

biggest number of maximal points. So, the presen-

tation of the online course structure and the quality

of developed educational materials correspond to the

given recommendations.

Moreover, participants were offered to evaluate

the general impression from the online course “Meth-

ods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Techni-

cal Universities” (Lovianova et al., 2021) (ﬁgure 12).

According to the survey results, 68% of respon-

dents believe that the course is developed at a high

level, 25% have estimated the course development at

a sufﬁcient level and 7% marked that the course re-

quires further development. Among the recommen-

dations given by the respondents concerning the im-

provement of the online course, we can note the idea

of including the ﬁnal test to evaluate the results of

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content

481

Figure 10: Mobile version of the course “Personal E-

learning Environment of the Maths Teacher”.

learning activities and modernization of the naviga-

tion system for the course program.

4 DISCUSSION

The analysis of the research by Cuesta (Cuesta, 2010),

McGahan et al. (McGahan et al., 2015) and work ex-

perience of APass Educational Group, LLC (APass

Educational Group, LLC, 2019) developing online

courses have conﬁrmed our point of view about the

inﬂuence of the quality of developing materials for

online courses on motivation and success during the

course. We agree with the point of view given by

Cuesta (Cuesta, 2010) who emphasizes the necessity

of constant analysis and evaluation of such parame-

ters as the formation of learning content, interaction

among course participants. We support the conclu-

sions given by McGahan et al. (McGahan et al., 2015)

about the importance of developing methodical re-

quirements for the content of online courses as the

main tool of its quality evaluation. The recommenda-

tions provided by the APass Educational Group, LLC

(APass Educational Group, LLC, 2019) are very im-

portant for our research; they offer to provide the efﬁ-

ciency of the educational aim of the course using the

following means: clear purpose presentation; corre-

spondence of the aim to the students’ expectations; di-

rect responsibility between educational aims and stu-

dents’ actions during the course and their evaluation;

learning materials selection and technologies that cor-

respond to the educational aims, student’s motivation

and support of their progress; content accessibility for

all the students.

We got acquainted with the accomplishments of

Scagnoli et al. (Scagnoli et al., 2019), Morrison (Mor-

rison, 2017), Puzziferro and Shelton (Puzziferro and

Shelton, 2019) when we started developing video lec-

tures. These works are dedicated to the research of

students’ opinions on the use of video lectures in on-

line classes. So, during the development of video lec-

tures, we were focused on the scientists’ recommen-

dations. These recommendations were the follow-

ing: to consider students’ needs; to plan thoroughly

and integrate into a balanced way video lectures with

other course materials; to use multimodal informa-

tion delivery; to create a sense of cooperation with

the content through students’ control over the media

and teachers’ presence.

The acquaintance with students’ evaluation via

Camtasia (Quora, 2019) as one of the most available

programs of editing and creating video has proved

the relevance of the choice of this program for pre-

senting course content. Screen recording with nec-

essary effects helped us to create a high-quality new

presentation and documents in PDF format. The in-

volvement of such a type of material was approved

by the forum participants. During the course pre-

sentation and every week, we encourage students to

take an active part in forums. This approach cor-

responds to the conclusions given by Mart

ın-Blas

and Serrano-Fern

andez (Mart

ın-Blas and Serrano-

Fern

andez, 2009), who prove that participants who

take an active part in forum discussions tend to get

higher marks and show a higher level of learning edu-

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

482

Figure 11: Results of testing educational materials of the course “Methods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Technical

Universities”.

Figure 12: The general impression from the online course

“Methods for Teaching Mathematics to Students in Techni-

cal Universities”.

cational material in comparison to those who did not

use the forum.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The relevance of the matter to develop methodical

recommendations for the structure and content of on-

line courses arises from the fact that the quality of ed-

ucation using online courses depends on the quality of

content development. Educational materials have to

be interesting, correspond to students’ expectations,

and encourage motivation during the course. The con-

tent development requires thorough planning and bal-

anced integration with other course materials. Testing

during the course should have both controlling and

educational functions. The creation of course content

should be accompanied by the evaluation of students

who help to assess the quality of the developed edu-

cational materials and detect gaps.

Based on the analysis of current recommenda-

tions regarding the development of online courses, as

well as considering the results of students’ and teach-

ers’ surveys we have described the methodical rec-

ommendations for the structure and content of online

courses. The course is based on weekly planning, the

test subsystem is implemented under extended func-

tionality, and abilities to organize feedback are inte-

grated. While planning online courses it is necessary

to plan properly and organize feedback with course

participants. The feedback allows detecting both pos-

itive aspects and gaps, drawbacks that were detected

during project planning and implementation.

The possible way of implementing feedback is the

creation of several thematic forums where informa-

tion exchange among the participants is possible.

The results enable to deﬁne several directions for

further research, among which the implementation of

online resource usability.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to everyone who has taken part in the

survey.

Methodical Recommendations for the Development of Online Course Structure and Content

483

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