The Online Design Course Experience

The online course design experience was an experience of a lifetime that only a few will experience. I had the opportunity to be in the few and I am so grateful for the wonderful experience. I had to sleep thinking design and wake up thinking design to get through the course. The most challenging part of the course design process was developing the paper and putting together assessments (formative and summative) because it just did not seem to flow and it was difficult to come up the assessment strategies. I also had difficulty identifying student-content, learner-learner, and learner-instructor activities that are engaging for my course design.

According to the best practice guidelines (n. d.), course designs should entail course introduction, course organization and design, and instructional design. In the introduction, the students and the instructor should start with an introduction, followed by what the students need to learn about the course software, and the requirements for the course, along with the expectations for the students. Next in the design is the course organization and design, where the instructor organizes the course materials for easy access and navigation, the provision of active links or urls, provision of attractive web pages, design of folders for questions and answers, capability to down load pages if necessary, and accessibility for all students.

The instructional design section of the course starts with the introduction of the learning units, overview of the topics, development of objectives, assessments, then comes the interactivity for the course, student-student, student-content, student-instructor, lessons development, grading rubrics, and aligning the course materials with the learning and course objectives. The instructor can help in the course room by ensuring that the learning activities and strategies meets the needs of the various learning styles in the learning community, so presentation of the course materials using a variety of medium is necessary, and the use of activities that are stimulating and challenging for learners with varied learning styles is necessary.

Why the paper development was probably tough could be because of my uncertainty of the course material and my fear of doing the wrong thing. However challenging the course was, I did learn the steps in the design process and I was able to engage in the evaluation process and provide feedback to my colleagues, which did support learning the course material. I also went through the entire design process with my colleagues and I was able to prepare three modules of instruction for the nursing process course.

Why the assessment section of the course design was a challenge for me, was because I was not sure if the assessment I put in the formative section was appropriate or if it should have been in the summative section. I did discover from the readings that the formative is ongoing and the summative is the assessment at the end of each unit to measure learning achievement for the section of a specific content mastery. Keeping the assessments in that frame of thought, I was able to come up with the two assessments for the course design.

The activities for each lessons was very complex to develop, because they are similar
to some degree but different in terms of who is interacting. For example, I can use e-mail for student-student and student-instructor interaction. I can use discussion board for student-instructor interaction and for student-student interaction and I can use it for student-content interaction. What is different about all of the discussion board is that the interaction in each differs. Another example is the use of e-mail in the course room for the student-student and student-instructor, because both groups can benefit from the use and that was confusing as to the degree of usage and purpose.

Another thing that was confusing was the use of blogs for student-student, student-content, and student-instructor interaction. In the student-instructor interaction, the instructor can use it to have a discussion and provide feedback. The student can use blogs to discuss course topics, or they can use blogs to work in groups and to collaborate on a paper development. For the student-content interaction, blogs are useful for course content discussion and writing assignments.

I had a difficult time keeping up with the course demands, and had to work quickly to get assignments submitted, which I felt that if I was not rushing, I probably could have done a better job. I think that if I ever get a chance to do another course design, the outcome will be much better than the first time around, because I have some knowledge about course design now that I did not have before.

A big consideration in the design of a course is to avoid copyrights violation. Feedback is important and ongoing feedback is necessary to support learning and knowledge sharing and to promote a nurturing learning environment.

Every course should have clear objectives and expectations, easy navigable websites, a structure that supports collaborative learning, activities and assignments that facilitate team collaboration, group collaboration, timely feedback (peer and instructor), appropriate technology, and a discussion folder for course discussion and a question and answer folder for ongoing and open communication. I had the opportunity to work through the entire design process introducing all of these elements into the course design, taking into consideration the different learning styles, learner issues, design constraints and consideration, content presentation strategies, and course interaction strategies for student-student, student-content, and student-instructor interaction, assessment and evaluation strategies.

The online course design was an experience of a lifetime that I will forever remember and cherish…

References:

Best practices in designing online courses. Retrieved November 27, 2010, from http://lpc1.clpccd.cc.ca.us/lpc/blackboard/best_practices/

Learning activities that foster interaction. http://lpc1.clpccd.cc.ca.us/lpc/blackboard/best_practices/learning_activities.pdf

Designing Courses: Instructional design for online learning
http://www.ibritt.com/resources/dc_instructionaldesign.htm