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Tom Worthington is an IT consultant and course designer for vocational and postgraduate university courses. In 2010 he was awarded Canberra ICT Educator of the Year by the Australian Computer Society, for his work on sustainable e-learning. Tom is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University. In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society for his contribution to the development of public Internet policy and previously worked for the Australian Government. He is a Past President, Honorary Life Member, Certified Professional and a Certified Computer Professional of the society as well as a voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Early Career Academics (ECA) are under increasing pressure to teach, as well as research. While PHD graduates have extensive experience of the university system, most have no formal education or training in how to teach. Some formal training in how to design and deliver courses would greatly reduce the frustration new academics, and their students, feel. ECAs would benefit from the discipline which comes from designing courses for pure on-line delivery, even if a face-to-face component is used later. This is illustrated in my experience of designing an award winning course in ICT Sustainability, which is now offered by universities in Australia and North America. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have recently come to prominence. Some of the techniques of these can be combined with conventional teaching for easy adoption by ECAs, using synchronized asynchronous e-learning with a linear syllabus, or for short: "MOOCs with Books".

• Study is Hard Work, so don't expect students to be happy all the time: May teachers become disheartened when they receive complaints from students. But think back to when you were a student: was it easy? Over the last year I have been studying part-time for a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, through blended learning (on-line and in the classroom). As well as learning much about how to design and deliver courses, including assessment design, the most important lesson from this was experiencing being a student again, with the frustration and hard work.
• Assessment is Most Important to Students, so devote 40% of your time to it: Dr Nerilee Flint's PHD research published in the book "Towards Fairer University Assessment: Recognizing the Concerns of Students" (Routledge, 2011) details how central assessment is to students. Assessment can also seem like a burden to staff. But it is key to education, so accept your are going to spend almost as much time on it as on instruction and integrate the assessment into the instruction. If you teach the students trough the assessment, you will be seen by the students as helpful, rather than this being a chore added on to the end of the course. Have 25% about for progressive assessment through the course, to keep the students working and to signal to them how they are doing, then 75% on a few large tasks, to really test them. Aloud using paper based examinations, as they are not a useful way to test real world skills.
• Provide All Course Materials at the Start, so don't have any surprises or changes: It is tempting to think you will take the students on a joint journey of discovery, where you explore issues as they arise. An exceptionally gifted and experienced educator may be able to do this, but an ECA should not risk it. Design all the course material, including the assessment, before the start of the course and provide it all to the students at the start. As well as making clear to the students what they have to do and when, it imposes a discipline on the teaching staff to make sure everything is ready.
• Use the Learning Management System, even for face-top-face courses: A learning management system, such as ANU's Wattle (Moodle), provides a convenient place to put all the course materials, assessment tasks, administrative announcements, so use it. You don't have to actually store materials in the LMS, if they are accessible on-line elsewhere, you can link to them.
• Do a teaching course to learn what to do, and to remind yourself of how hard it is to be a student: Teaching is not a skill which comes naturally: it need to be learned and practiced. ECAs should expect to do at least the equivalent of one semester unit in formal studies on how to teach and preferably four units (a graduate certificate). You can pick up what to do as you going along, but much of what you pick up from colleagues will be wrong and result in low student feedback ratings.

Computers and telecommunications (ICT) equipment is powered by electricity. If the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuel, this releases carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere. The CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, which traps sunlight, causing global warming.

A carbon emissions audit for the the Australian Computer Society (ACS), reported in 2007 that 1.52% of Australian carbon emissions were attributable to computers and telecommunications equipment. In response, the ACS, commissioned Tom Worthington to design an e-learning course in “Green ICT Strategies”, to train professionals in how to measure and reduce CO₂ emissions. It was first run as part of the postgraduate masters level program in February 2009.

The course was first run by ACS, in February 2009 as "Green ICT Strategies" (later renamed "Green Technology Strategies"), with students who are working in the ICT industry. The course was then modified slightly are run by Tom Worthington in the graduate program of Australian National University (ANU) from July 2009 as Green Information Technology Strategies, COMP7310 (later renamed ICT Sustainability). A North American version of the course was developed by Brian Stewart for Athabasca University (Canada) in 2011 as "Green ICT Strategies".

The course was designed as part of the ACS Computer Professional Education Program, which uses a Constructivist e-Learning approach, derived from that of the UK Open University.

The course objectives and assessment items are based on the skills definitions for “Sustainability Assessment” and “Sustainability Strategy” at level 5 of the Skills Framework for the information Age (SFIA).

The course notes used by ACS students were released under a Creative Commons open access license. This allowed the material to be revised for use at the Australian National University in July 2009. This version was then further revised and used for ACS students in the next semester. This approach allowed the more rapid revision of material than would be possible with a a conventional textbook, and with more resources available than if the notes were just used by one institution.

As the notes evolved, it became clear that some of the administrative procedures would need to be separated from the subject content. As an example, different educational institutions use different assessment procedures, such as grading scales and proportion of marks for weekly work and assignments. The use of the Learning Management System (LMS) made it possible to remove the administrative detail from the course notes and rely on them being available from other documents in the system. This also removes some burden from the student to have to read through the same standard material for each course they are undertaking: if the student can see it is the same link from the LMS for all courses, then they need read it only once.

While it may seem useful to have requirements for an assessment to be as detailed and specific as possible, this may not be the case. Courses which are part of an overall program should have consistent requirements. Thus it should not be necessary to restate the details common to all assessment in every assessment item or in every course. This is particularly the case where a LMS is used. The National Quality Council's “Ideal Characteristics of an Assessment Tool” include the details of how assessment is to be recorded, which can be dealt standardised by the institution by using an LMS.

The course was originally prepared using the web based course authoring tools in the Moodle Learning Management System (MLS). The ACS, ANU and Athabasca University all use the same LMS, allowing simple transfer of the course-ware between systems, via the Moodle backup and restore function.

The first version of the course used a separate web document for each of the twelve weekly topics in the course. However, this created a maintenance burden and was confusing for the student. The materials were therefore all consolidated into one web based eBook, using the Moodle “book module” function, with one chapter per topic in the book.

The course content was exported from Moodle in HTML format and converted to Amazon Kindle and Apple and ePub eBook formats, as well as PDF, a standalone web site and a print-on-demand paperback book. However, provision of the notes within the LMS has proved more popular with students and simpler to maintain.

Assessment is by contribution to weekly forums and two written assignments: mid semester and at the end of the course. The weekly forum questions are at the end of each week in the course book. The assessment scheme, assignment questions and rubrics are in the assessment appendix of the book.

The tutor is key to this form of e-learning. In the introductory posting for the course, the tutor is required to point out where the assessment items are and explain that the rubric are based on the generic one of the institution: weekly forum assessment is a limited fail, pass, credit scale and the assignments the full scale. Each week the tutor should post each question for that week as a forum topic, so the students can post their answers in that thread of discussion.

In the weekly forum posting for the course, the tutor should provide an example of a good posting, suggest areas for general improvement. The tutor should also remind students how many weeks there are to the next assignment being due and that the weekly forum questions are designed to be used in the assignments.

In the weekly individual feedback to students (via the Dialogue tool of the LMS, not email), the tutor must provide a mark for that week and at least one example of a good posting by the student and one suggestion for an improvement to a posting. If there are no postings from a student for a week, they should be reminded by the tutor that participation is compulsory and after two weeks, the program supervisor should be advised.

The assignments are marked with reference to a rubric, first determining what grade is warranted and then the mark within the grade. Marks are not allocated to individual aspects of the work and no summation is carried out. The examiner can use a copy of the rubric as feedback to the student, with relevant comments indicated by highlighting phases in the rubric (this can be done with an electronic document returned via the LMS).

Conventional educational theory suggests that formative feedback should be provided to students to help them improve. This should be in addition to summative assessment for the final grading for a course. However, students pay far closer attention to marks than they do to tutor feedback. The practice experience of this course is that a weekly mark of 2% accompanying the feedback is sufficient to have the students pay attention to what they are being told by the tutor.

The course requires students to prepare reports typical or a workplace setting. This contrasts with the multiple choice test used by the British Computer Society for their “Foundation Certificate in Green IT. An IT practitioner is unlikely to be asked multiple choice questions as part of their daily job.

Students are encouraged to answer all assessment items from the point of view of their workplace (or one they are familiar with), making them more authentic to the student. The assessment items are based on official international skills definitions from the professional body, and so are similar to real tasks. The student as are required to make real calculations based on a real world situation, requiring the students to demonstrate mastery. As both the course content and assignments are based closely on skills definitions and practice standards, there is a clear alignment between learning outcomes, course content, assessment and professional knowledge. Workplace skills are integrated by the student being encouraged to submit a real report from their workplace, in consultation with their supervisor. The weekly questions and feedback are intended to show how the assessment helps with learning.

Massive Open Online Courses ( MOOCs) have recently been widely discussed in education forums and this is now spreading to the business and general media. These large scale courses use synchronised asynchronous e-learning and a highly structured approach which ECAs could use to help them in their early teaching pratice.

Some characteristics of an MOOC are:

1. Massive: 100,000 students or more. Australia's large university has less than 50,000 students.
2. Open: No scholastic or financial barrier to enrollment. Materials may also be open educational resources.
3. On-line: Materials delivered and students interact via the Internet.
4. Course: Similar in size to an Australian university subject of about a 12 week semester one quarter full time student load (a US course). But does not provide a credential on completion.

Because of the large scale a relatively small teaching staff available, MOOC design emphasizes carefully prepared and tested material, active involvement by students in their learning (including helping each other, peer assessment). Current MOOCs have a linear structure of course delivery and some use conventional textbooks. These are techniques which ECAs could do well to emulate, even if they are teaching in a conventional face-to-face classroom.