Ideally, the design of a course should allow students to customize the experience to meet their goals and complement their personal learning styles. Leonard and DeLacey draw two observations from an Adult Learning Workshop [*] held at Harvard Business School that are useful to keep in mind when designing enhanced, blended or fully-online courses:

• students who already know the power of a classroom experience will not easily abandon that model for something new;
• because humans have "certain, predictable preferences and capabilities in learning," some principles of learning span different academic methods.

They offer seven simple, yet valuable ideas that should be incorporated into the design of online courses:

• Learning is a social activity: group activities and communities aid in the effectiveness of the learning experience because of the basic nature of human beings as social creatures.
• Integrate learning into life: making connections to a student's work or life outside the classroom is critical because it provides a context in which the acquired knowledge can be used.
• Enable learning by doing: practice is the best way for a student to truly gain mastery of a subject or concept.
• Encourage learning by discovery: research indicates that people retain information longer when they are given the opportunity to realize ideas and solutions from their own understanding.
• Remember that individuals have different mental receptors for material: coherence of new material somewhat depends on what a student may already know. This can both help and hinder learning, and an instructor needs to be cognizant of this fact when delivering material.
• Make it fun: students who are engaged and involved are obviously more open to the learning experience. Fun is not just for children because a playful non-threatening environment also helps adult students benefit from the experience.
• Build in assessment, but don't delude yourself into thinking you can measure learning: quantitative assessment becomes more difficult with increased content complexity. Also, some learning may take time to digest and is not accurately measurable within the temporal course.

[*] Leonard, D. and DeLacey, B. Designing Hybrid OnLine/In-Class Learning Programs for Adults. c.2002; http://www.hbs.edu/research/facpubs/workingpapers/papers2/0203/03-036.pdf