Learn@UW and Moodle are two leading course management systems that allow instructors to manage online course sites. 

The article below provides some tangible ideas for making the last class meeting an opportunity for connection, reflection, and celebration.

As a number of noted educators have suggested, the process of designing a new course can be made more manageable if you have a clear sense at the start of the process what you are hoping students will take away from their learning experience. That sounds good, but how do you figure out what are your end goals?

At it's most basic level, a syllabus provides students with information about the dates for readings, assignments, and exams. However, a syllabus can be used to communicate so much more information to your students and can help set the tone for the entire semester.

"You'll spend an outlandish amount of time on the course-ten hours or more of preparation for every lecture hour. You'll start neglecting your research and your personal life just to keep up with the course preparation, and if you're unfortunate enough to have two new preps at once, you may no longer have a personal life to neglect. Your lecture notes will be so long and dense that to cover them you'll have to lecture at a pace no normal human being could possibly follow; you'll have no time for interactivity in class; and you'll end up skimming some important material or skipping it altogether."