For the purpose of an example product for this chapter, I have selected the open source ePortfolio product Mahara from http://www.mahara.org.
Before you set up a course it is important to know what the goals of the training are; that is, what are the learning objectives for each part of the course. Traditionally this has been done for face to face with a curriculum structure of a Scheme of Work. This becomes the map which you configure your online course with.
Below we will go through a sample extract from a Scheme of Work for an introduction course on a product called Mahara. This is an online product used for e-Portfolios, but this approach can work for all product types.
There are many layouts used for creating a Scheme of Work for a class, but they all generally cover the structure and the content of a course.
There are two key aspects of the Scheme of Work structure.
Firstly, there is an overall summary section; this abstracts all the objectives and...