Students from all over the world now have the opportunity to access a wide variety of high-quality educational resources thanks to the rise of online learning. In recent years, there has been a rise in popularity of online education among both students and teachers. This pattern has only continued to increase with the occurrence of global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many people to work and study from home. Therefore, it is crucial that online courses are presented in a manner that is suitable for a diverse range of potential students. Many educators lack the necessary experience to move their physical courses to an online environment, which has become a recent trend. Educators tend to teach in the manner in which they were taught, which may not translate well to online learning delivery. Moreover, many learners today are assumed to possess the necessary knowledge and skills to participate in online learning without much thought. The combination of assumed learner knowledge and lack of online-specific teaching experience can result in the introduction of artificial barriers to the student's learning by educators. If left unaddressed, these artificial barriers or artificial learning thresholds can cause the student to experience anxiety, a lack of engagement, and a lack of motivation to complete the course for which they are enrolled in. The global expansion of online education has increased the demand for professional training and specialised knowledge to help teachers instruct students and create online course materials. First, this dissertation highlights some of the success and challenge factors of online learning. It discusses threshold concepts and suggests that arti cial barriers or artificial thresholds can hinder online learning. The dissertation demonstrates a simple example of what an artificial learning threshold can be and presents the development of a framework that can guide an educator to construct courses with the aim to eliminate artificial learning thresholds. Second, the dissertation verifies and discusses the resulting framework by presenting and discussing feedback based on an expert educator review of the framework. This dissertation proposes that educators can be guided, by following the developed framework, on how to design courses with no artificial learning barriers. It is the researcher's contention that doing so will reduce student anxiety and increase motivation and engagement.