Planning for an Effective Online Course Design
A good first step in planning for an effective online course is to identify the factors that affect online learning. One factor is the cost involved in developing online material, along with any resources and support available to you through your university. It can be very cost-intensive to develop a multimedia-heavy online course, especially if your university does not provide any support for the creation of these objects. Another factor is access. Students must have regular access to both a computer and the Internet, along with any specialized software needed for the course. You must also consider any policy issues that may be in place at your academic institution, and any special procedures that may need to be followed in developing an online course. Additionally, it is important to remember that technology is not a magic fix for instruction- bad face-to-face instruction will not be made better simply by delivering it with technology. The Interaction portion of this website (linked at left) focuses more on recommendations for effective content delivery.
It is also important to recognize both the advantages and limitations of online learning. Online learning is popular because of its convenience- students can access their course materials on any day, at any time, and from any place with an Internet connection. An online course can also provide access to additional knowledge not available in the traditional classroom, such as links to virtual tours of museums around the world. Online courses can also connect students with experts in the field through the use of chat rooms, email, and discussion boards. However, it is also important to keep in mind the limitations of online learning. Online courses are dependent on the technology that created and delivers them, and sometimes technology fails. Also, some students feel more comfortable in a face to face environment and may need some time to adjust to an online environment. It can be a good idea to incorporate some "icebreaker" activities at the beginning of an online class to get the students acquainted with both the technology and each other. Another potential concern relates to assessment- if it is very important to you that students do not use a book or other resources when taking an exam or writing an essay, then you should consider having students take your online exams through a proctoring site, such as a Library.
With these things in mind, then select the appropriate online teaching format for you. Do you find yourself leaning towards a behaviorist or a constructivist philosophy? Or maybe a bit of both? If you prefer the constructivist approach, your online course may be designed with a strong emphasis on discussion forums, chats, and collaborative exercises. If you fall into the behaviorist approach, you may decide to focus on creating clear and useful objectives, and developing assessments that measure comprehension based on the objectives. Or maybe some of all of the above.
Once you have thought about some of these issues, you may be collecting ideas for your specific online course(s). However, make sure that you keep in mind any time constraints you may be facing. Many times instructors plan to include more material in a course than they have time to create. Consider the amount of content you will need for the course. Will it be a course you've taught before? If not, you may spend more time determining, writing and collecting content than for a course that you have taught before. Even if the course is not content-heavy, consider what activities/interactions you will incorporate. A multimedia-rich course takes much longer to develop than one that is primarily text based.
Another factor to consider, which also relates to content presentation, is how many sections of a course you are planning to put online. Many, if not most, instructors just create an online section of a course that gets added to the list of face-to-face courses. However, you and your department might want to consider a large course redesign.This is a process introduced by grants from the Pew Foundation and by the Center for Academic Transformation, and is steadily gaining in popularity. You can refer to the Center for Academic Transformation link for more details, but in general this is a process that involves taking courses with multiple different sections and large enrollments an redesigning them so that all sections of the course share one online section, using the same content and automated features, such as quizzing. This reduces the number of professors needed to teach separate sections, and frees up campus classroom space. It standardizes the content for a course and frees time for professors to focus on research. Typically one or two professors teach the class, and a small number of teaching assistants handle the student assignments that are not automated. This is an approach to online course design that has been proven to be effective and to save universities thousands of dollars, but the process typically requires buy-in from the entire department, and does take considerable up-front planning time. The results are worth it though.
Finally, when developing an online course, it is important to always keep in mind the digital divide. The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to digital materials "that arise from broader social inequalities based upon social class and income, occupation, gender, race and ethnicity, geographical location.... and nationality. (Flew, p. 84). Although internet access becomes more available each day, and even high speed access is becoming more and more common, there are still many people who do not have any regular access to the internet, much less a high speed connection, and some less urbanized places where access to the internet is not readily available. This is particularly true in countries other than the United States. A 2002 study showed that 84 percent of the world's internet population was composed of only the 20 largest internet-using nations, and 33.4 percent was accounted for by the United States alone. (Flew, p.85) It is particularly important to keep this in mind if you work for a public institution where the mission is to provide equal access to education for all people, regardless of economic, social and geographic considerations. Try to limit the number of bandwidth intensive elements in your online course, and whenever possible, provide low bandwidth versions, such as with video.
Flew, Terry (2002). New Media: An Introduction. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.