Instructional Design for Effective Learning (OpenLearning)

Offered by OpenLearning,
Instructional Design for Effective Learning (OpenLearning)

Want to engage and motivate your students? Keen to create authentic and meaningful learning experiences that really connect? In this course, learn how to design and develop an amazing learning program that your students will love! Taught by the OpenLearning team, this course explores the principles of effective learning design; relevant to face-to-face teaching as well as online and blended.

Throughout the course you will:

  • Practice designing engaging and effective learning experiences for students.
  • Delve into the Constructivist theory of education and use it to inform your instructional design thinking, before applying the instructional design process to designing and developing a learning program.
  • Build your own Instructional Design Project, ideally for you to use in your real-world teaching. In this project, you will design and develop a high-level learning program plan for 6 sessions; with 1 of these sessions planned out with engaging learning experiences.

This is an interactive and fun course! Get to know each other, have meaningful discussions and really take ownership of your own learning process.

Time involved in the course
This course is taught entirely online. There is no set time frame, you can do the activities when they suit you best. It should take approximately 12-15 hours to complete the core learning experiences, plus your Instructional Design Project.

Optional paid certification - $50AUD
Want to receive a Certificate of Completion, to recognise your time and experience throughout the course? You can now purchase a completion certificate when you complete 100% of the course.

Course Outcomes

  • Reflect on educational learning philosophy and pedagogy for deep learning
  • Evaluate and critique learning experiences based on how much they could facilitate deep learning
  • Identify the parameters and critical features relevant to a learning situation and students
  • Determine the needs, interests and motivations of learners in a learning program
  • Design a learning program structure
  • Write measurable learning outcomes
  • Develop a learning program's content
  • Design creative, authentic and meaningful activities that align with learning outcomes
  • Review and evaluate the effectiveness of a learning program

Course Overview

This course is made up of 5 core modules that step through the process of designing a learning program from start to finish. Work through them at your own pace!
Module 1: How people learn best
We will explore how people learn best, delving into pedagogy, motivation and how to facilitate deep learning. This will form the solid foundations needed to design an effective learning program and set everything else in motion!

Module 2: Determine program parameters
This section explores who your learners are, how to motivate them and ask all the right questions before jumping into the design stage.

Module 3: Design the learning program structure
Here we cover the bigger picture of your learning program, deciding on learning outcomes (for the end game), assessment and developing the program's structure and flow.

Module 4: Developing learning program content and activitie
This module explores the essence of your learning program: developing the content and resources for your learning program; and ways to create effective and fun activities.

Module 5: The learning program final touches and review
In this section, you will review your learning program for effectiveness, before getting ready to share your completed Design Project!

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Resilient Teaching Through Times of Crisis and Change (Coursera) Coursera
University of Michigan

Resilient Teaching Through Times of Crisis and Change (Coursera)

Resilient teaching is the ability to facilitate learning experiences that are designed to be adaptable to fluctuating conditions and disruptions. This teaching ability can be seen as an outcome of a design approach that attends to the relationship between learning goals and activities, and the environments they are situated in. Resilient teaching approaches take into account how a dynamic learning context may require new forms of interactions between teachers, students, content, and tools. Additionally, they necessitate the capacity to rethink the design of learning experiences based on a nuanced understanding of context.

Oct 12th 2026
4 Weeks
Copyright for Educators & Librarians (Coursera) Coursera
Duke University,Emory University,University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Copyright for Educators & Librarians (Coursera)

Fear and uncertainty about copyright law often plagues educators and sometimes prevents creative teaching. This course is a professional development opportunity designed to provide a basic introduction to US copyright law and to empower teachers and librarians at all grade levels. Course participants will discover that the law is designed to help educators and librarians.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Scaling up Excellence - How to run a world class MOOC (OpenLearning) OpenLearning
Other Entities

Scaling up Excellence - How to run a world class MOOC (OpenLearning)

Welcome to the Mooc on how to create and run an effective MOOC. The fundamental ideas are not hard but that may be a bit different to the ways you have approached teching before. In this course we will help you create your first MOOC and guide in designing and making it an effective and successful course. Teachers of effective MOOCS find the experience very enjoyable a fulfilling. We will do our best to help you experience this pleasure!

Self Paced
Self-Paced
Teaching LGBTQ+ Health (Coursera) Coursera
Stanford University

Teaching LGBTQ+ Health (Coursera)

This curriculum is designed for faculty members and health professions educators. The course goals are to improve your knowledge, teaching skills, and attitudes pertaining to the provision of health care to LGBTQ+ patients.e.g. This is primarily aimed at first- and second-year undergraduates interested in engineering or science, along with high school students and professionals with an interest in programming.

Oct 12th 2026
2 Weeks
Innovative Teaching with ChatGPT (Coursera) Coursera
Vanderbilt University

Innovative Teaching with ChatGPT (Coursera)

Despite what you may have heard, ChatGPT offers exciting possibilities for supporting innovative teaching and personalized education. This course provides practical techniques that any educator, from K-12 to higher education, can use to help support their teaching. No experience with ChatGPT, prompt engineering, or Generative AI is required.

Oct 12th 2026
1 Week
Training and Learning Programs for Volunteer Community Health Workers (Coursera) Coursera
Johns Hopkins University

Training and Learning Programs for Volunteer Community Health Workers (Coursera)

Volunteer community health workers (CHWs) are a major strategy for increasing access to and coverage of basic health interventions. Our village health worker training course reviews the process of training and continuing education of CHWs as an important component of involving communities in their own health service delivery. Participants will be guided through the steps of planning training and continuing education activities for village volunteers. The course draws on real-life examples from community-directed onchocerciasis control, village health worker programs, community case management efforts, peer educators programs and patent medicine vendor training programs, to name a few.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Claves para la innovación en la docencia universitaria (Coursera) Coursera
University of Barcelona

Claves para la innovación en la docencia universitaria (Coursera)

Claves para la innovación en la docencia universitaria forma parte de la dimensión docente del proyecto TO INN sobre la innovación en las instituciones de educación superior y, se centra específicamente, en aquellas que forman a futuros maestros y maestras, aunque, por sus características, es un curso abierto a muchos públicos.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Instructional Design Foundations and Applications (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Instructional Design Foundations and Applications (Coursera)

This course, Instructional Design Foundations, is an introductory course as part of Instructional Design MasterTrack Certificate. This particular course will introduce learners to the conceptual and theoretical foundations of instructional design as well as the analysis aspect of instructional systems design in order to create an innovative instructional solution to performance problems in organizations.

Oct 12th 2026
4 Weeks
Teaching Science at University (Coursera) Coursera
University of Zurich

Teaching Science at University (Coursera)

This course will prepare you for teaching science in higher education. In this MOOC you will learn to make your knowledge as an excellent researcher accessible to your students. We will show you how to communicate science to novices as well as advanced students in science.

Oct 12th 2026
5-12 Weeks