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At the New Teacher Center, we work with educators every day to provide them with support to be truly effective. We understand that students are unique — individual learners with individual needs. Teachers and teacher leaders must have an arsenal of approaches to be able to respond to their students.

If you’re a leader or an educator at an academic institution, you’re already well acquainted with the many benefits of digital learning:

When building online learning — a program, course, certification, or degree —  a critical decision is what type of technology platform to use. Choosing an online learning platform should be easy, right? Learning management systems have been around for 20+ years, this problem has been solved before, just pick one.

Warren Buffett’s right hand man, Charlie Munger, coined (or made famous) the idea of the “too hard pile.” Back in the day when communication was by physical letters and memos, you would have three bins on your desk: inbox, outbox and the “too hard pile.” In Charlie’s world of investing at Berkshire Hathaway, the key was to look at an investment opportunity and decide where it belonged. If there was “hair on the deal”, his rule was to put it in the “too hard pile” and move on.

When I was a professor (not all that long ago), designing a class was not much more complicated than “figure out what you want to teach, and then talk about that and give an exam.” Moving a course online within an online or hybrid program requires, shall we say, a bit more insight and planning. To give youan idea of the kind of planning we think is necessary, our team put together the following 10 best practices for online learning program development.