Protect Your Time and Enhance Efficiency With Sustainable Course Design

Teaching in higher education today is more demanding of our faculty than ever, with students expecting their courses delivered in a variety of modalities—face-to-face, online, hybrid and more. The flexibility of these options benefit students, but it often leaves educators grappling with the overwhelming task of preparing content for multiple formats. The time spent reworking a single course for different modalities can quickly become unsustainable, contributing to burnout. However, there’s a promising solution that could alleviate some of these challenges: sustainable course design.

Sustainable course design is a design approach that allows educators to streamline course preparation and adapt their teaching to any modality. Built around established educational principles like Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction and Michael Moore’s Theory of Transactional Distance, sustainable course design has the potential to improve both instructional efficiency and fidelity of delivery. Though still evolving, this approach shows promise in reducing the burden of course prep and creating a more cohesive learning environment across formats.

The Challenge of Instructional Prep Across Modalities

Faculty today often find themselves managing courses that are delivered in several formats: face-to-face, hybrid, synchronous online and asynchronous online. This can create a tremendous burden, as each modality is assumed to require its own distinct set of materials, assessments and instructional strategies. Without an efficient way to adapt content, educators may find themselves essentially teaching several different versions of the same course, with each format demanding hours of additional prep time.

This complexity is particularly pronounced in the transition from face-to-face teaching to online formats, where the absence of real-time, in-person interaction creates what Michael Moore describes as “transactional distance”—a psychological and communicative gap between instructors and students. According to Moore’s Theory of Transactional Distance, courses with the greatest transactional distance (such as asynchronous online courses) require more structure and engagement to bridge this gap. Assuming more structure and engagement can serve students in all modalities, sustainable course design attempts to address this challenge by creating a robust course structure that works in any modality, with particular attention to the demands of asynchronous online instruction.

What is Sustainable Course Design?

Sustainable course design is an approach that allows instructors to create a single, adaptable course structure that can be used across multiple teaching environments. It is built around the concept of designing for the most complex modality first—typically asynchronous online instruction, due to its need for high levels of structure and clarity to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction. Once this robust structure is in place, it can be easily modified for face-to-face, hybrid, or synchronous online delivery.

At the core of sustainable course design is Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction, a framework that outlines the key elements of effective learning experiences. These nine events—gaining attention, informing learners of objectives, stimulating recall of prior learning, presenting content, providing learning guidance, eliciting performance, offering feedback, assessing performance and enhancing retention—serve as the foundation of each module within a course. By ensuring that most or all these elements are present, instructors can create a comprehensive, well-structured course that is flexible enough to be adapted to different modalities.

For example, in an asynchronous online course, content delivery might involve a pre-recorded video lecture or interactive multimedia presentation, while in a face-to-face course, this would be a live synchronous classroom experience. For that face-to-face section, the instructor would selectively hide the lecture video. Then the instructor could choose to release the video as study material or only make it available for absent students. By building the course around Gagne’s Nine Events and planning the selective release or hiding of key module components, faculty can ensure that necessary instructional components are ready and available, making it easier to modify the delivery method based on the modality.

Key Principles of Sustainable Course Design

Sustainable course design is rooted in several key principles that guide educators toward building adaptable, efficient courses:

1. Design for the Most Complex Modality First: Asynchronous online courses typically require the most structure to compensate for the greater transactional distance between students and instructors. By designing for this modality first, educators can create a course that is clear, organized and complete, then adjust elements for other formats such as face-to-face or hybrid.

2. Use Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction: These events serve as the backbone of a sustainable course. By building each module around these events, instructors ensure that the necessary elements of instruction are present, regardless of the format. For example, solicitation of performance might take the form of a class debate. In an online section this might take the form of a discussion board or video discussion, while in a face-to-face course, it might take the form of an in-class activity.

3. Modular Organization: Organizing courses into well-defined modules allows for easy adaptation. Each module should contain everything students need for a week, or a unit as defined by the learning objectives—lectures, readings, assignments and assessments—in one place, so that only minor adjustments are needed when shifting between formats.

4. Flexibility of a Templated Design: Sustainable course design makes it possible to reuse and adapt content for future semesters with minimal effort by maintaining one templated design. By maintaining a single design data can inform updates that are applied to all future course sections saving faculty time and benefitting future students.

5. Data-Guided Improvements: By using the learning management system (LMS) as a central repository for any course section, student and faculty interactions with the LMS are inevitable. These interactions mean data that can inform actions are automatically generated for the instructor. Responses to this data might include student interventions, error correction, or even course design refinement.

Benefits for Educators: Streamlining Course Prep

For faculty, sustainable course design offers a promising way to streamline course preparation and minimize repetitive tasks. By building a comprehensive course framework designed for the most complex teaching format, faculty can avoid re-creating materials for each new modality. Instead, they can adjust existing materials based on the needs of the course—hiding certain components for face-to-face instruction or adding extra activities for hybrid formats.

This approach is particularly useful when unexpected changes occur, such as a sudden shift from face-to-face to online teaching. By having a robust, adaptable course structure in place, educators can transition between modalities without scrambling to redesign their entire course by releasing the hidden content as appropriate.

Benefits for Students: Enhancing Learning Through Consistency

Sustainable course design also holds promise for improving the student learning experience. One of the main challenges students face in multi-modal courses is inconsistency in the course structure. With each format presenting a different layout, students may struggle to find the materials they need or stay on top of assignments. A consistent, well-organized course structure helps alleviate these challenges.

Additionally, aligned with Moore’s theory, sustainable course design should foster greater student independence. By organizing content into structured modular units, students can navigate the course to access the resources they need when they need them and revisit content they need to practice.

The principles of sustainable design also help ensure that students are receiving high-quality instruction, no matter the modality. By maintaining a consistent instructional approach—whether through online quizzes or in-class discussions—students are better able to focus on the content rather than the format of the course.

Using Data to Improve Course Design

Another promising aspect of sustainable course design is the opportunity it provides for continuous improvement through data analysis. Many LMSs offer tools that allow faculty to track student performance and engagement. By automatically analyzing quiz scores, assignment submissions and discussion participation, instructors can identify patterns in student behavior and adjust their course design accordingly.

For example, if data shows that students consistently struggle with a particular concept, faculty can provide additional resources or revise how the material is presented. This data-driven approach allows for ongoing refinement of course design, making the process of teaching more adaptive and responsive to student needs.

Practical Steps to Implement Sustainable Course Design

Implementing sustainable course design requires thoughtful planning and an openness to experimentation. Here are some steps educators can take to begin using this approach:

1. Start With Online-First Design: Build your course as if it will be delivered fully online, paying close attention to structure and organization. This will help ensure that all content is available and adaptable.

2. Incorporate Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction: Use these events as a guide when designing each module to ensure that key instructional components are present, regardless of the modality.

3. Plan Your Hide and Release Patterns: Plan how your will hide and release content or activities for each modality you are likely to teach. Organize these plans into a chart and house this and other instructor guidance in the template within an Instructor Only module that is always hidden from students.

4. Review and Respond: Regularly review the automatically generated analytics provided by the LMS or any other integrated tools.  Use the data to monitor individual and collective student performance and engagement. Adjust your course design based on what the data says works and what doesn’t, continuously improving your template.

A Promising Approach

While not a panacea, sustainable course design offers a strategy for reducing the time burden of course prep, generating actionable data for all modalities automatically and improving the student experience. By adopting sustainable course design, educators can create courses that are not only flexible and adaptable across various teaching modalities but also responsive to student needs through the integration of data-driven insights. This approach empowers faculty to focus more on engaging with students and improving instruction, tending to research, or performing service, rather than constantly reworking course materials.

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