Online learning is expanding rapidly today in many Canadian universities. Fuelled by Canada's unprecedented broadband access, online teaching is creating new challenges for faculty and new responsibilities for educational developers. Although there is adequate literature with regard to faculty thinking about course planning in general, there are few publications on how they actually plan for online teaching. The purpose of this applied research study was to develop an instructional design model adapted to the needs and resources of faculty at a dual‐mode university (offering courses both on‐campus and online). Using a case study methodology, this project documented the prototype‐building, its implementation and gradual modification in response to faculty feedback. Results indicate that faculty preferred a more traditional, discipline‐based course design model for online course planning and shunned high‐level instructional design, opting for lighter‐weight, dialog‐rich instructional design emphasizing real‐time, faculty–student interaction.