Distant education and online courses have recently become a part of a new reality, especially in the last four months as many institutes and universities all over the world had to shift most of their educational content online because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It appeared that some higher educational institutions and a certain part of their students were almost ready to go online as these institutions had been developing their online platforms thus integrating traditional face-to-face classes with computer-assisted learning as well as integrating massive open or shared online courses into their curricular. At the same time, many other universities and institutes proved to be absolutely unprepared to shift online as they and their students had neither their own educational environment and online resources developed by their teaching staff nor any experience of working in an external online environment and choosing courses appropriate for their educational purposes. It turned out that most existing online courses could not be successfully used for implementing into most universities curricula and for teaching a majority of technical students as they simply reproduced the traditional classroom learning process and missed all advantages and opportunities afforded by online learning environments. The authors objective for this research in progress is to identify the key features and describe structure, content and assessment specifics of an academical online course for technical students. This paper provides tips on how to organize the course content into a proper structure stressing what types of teaching materials could be uploaded to the educational platform and goes into its assessment specifics. In a long-term perspective the authors aim to design, develop and introduce a modern and progressive constructivist learning environment for teaching business English in technical universities.