For an infographic summary of some major design and development steps covered in this tutorial, click here.

This tutorial is intended to support faculty and course developers at CUNY School of Professional Studies (SPS) as they embark upon the design and development of new online courses or new units, content, or activities in a course or a revision (major or minor) of a course. The two main goals of this tutorial are to enhance the student learning experience and to save time and effort for those developing courses and the staff or team assisting them. In writing for a general faculty audience, we have only sparingly used terminology from the instructional design field.

While this tutorial’s expected audience is SPS faculty and course developers who have already completed initial Blackboard training and those engaged in or who have completed the Preparation for Teaching Online workshop, it is hoped that those readers on the CUNY Commons who do not fit into these categories may still find much of the tutorial beneficial. Whatever your level of experience in teaching, online teaching, or course design, we hope you will find some helpful tips and greater understanding on some of the aspects of online course design and development through this tutorial. For those readers in the profession of instructional design, we hope you might find some of this material useful in communicating with faculty during the course design and development process.

The tutorial may be followed in sequence of its 10 modules, or through focus on one or more of the modules separately.

We want to acknowledge those who worked on this tutorial—Susan Ko, Kelley Kawano, Antonia Levy, José Muñiz, Krystyna Michael, and Sarah Kresh—as well as all those Instructional Technology Fellows, past and present, from the Office of Faculty Development and Instructional Design who contributed to workshops, guides, and other SPS faculty development content woven into these modules.