Construction planning is an important and challenging teaching area in construction management programmes, as it covers sophisticated contents ranging from calculations, visualisation and writing up essay-style documents, to implementation and applications of practical problems. The construction management programme at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) accommodates students with diverse language and cultural backgrounds, and with mixed technical and soft skills and competencies. This heterogeneity poses challenges in implementing a universal teaching strategy that can effectively cater to the needs of all students in higher education. Based on the literature review, a student-centred flexible learning strategy and various digital tools are adopted. However, digital tools can only help when they integrate well with an appropriate course design. To fully utilise the advantage of digital tools in this course, a “More for Less” principle is adopted in the course material development. Multiple learning paths are developed to facilitate flexible learning to match individual student’s learning style. The course design incorporates a “staged-learning” approach, where each stage is aligned with distinct skill sets and assessment methods. This supports a streamlined process for the identification of milestones and the promotion of deep learning. The effectiveness of the course design is validated by the significantly increased teaching evaluation scores and positive comments provided by students in the course evaluation survey. The innovative course design and use of digital tools provide a successful teaching strategy as well as practical examples for facilitating effective online flexible learning for a wide range of other courses.