aect-flexible design for online course

Flexible Design Model for Online Course Development
Short Description:

This presentation will describe how the instructional design and development the World Campus at Penn State has evolved over the past years in order to develop effective and efficient online courses. Also, the presenter will discuss the flexible design models to meet different faculty needs.
Abstract: (Click here to enhance readability)

The Pennsylvania State University has been involved in distance education since 1892 and has produced courses that have been delivered via a variety of media. In 1997 Penn State launched the World Campus as the primary delivery unit for courses offered to students at a distance. This year also marked the beginning of development of online courses for our distance education students. While courses in the past had integrated listserves and gophers, 1997 marked the beginning of the design and development of wholly online courses delivered through WebCT. Now Penn State’s World Campus offers more than three hundred online courses and enrolls students from around the world. When an instructional designer of the World Campus works with the subject matter, Penn State faculty to design and develop an online course, two semester model and two weeks model are usually adopted. Two-Semester Model Two-semester model allowed for an eight to twelve month development cycle where faculty authors first met with the designers to review their existing face-to-face course and examine existing print based course. At the end of the initial meetings the faculty left with a course design guide in hand and constructed in writing their course content. This process took six to eight months. For the first semester, faculty write the syllabus, lesson content and lesson activities. Designers did not begin work on the courses until all content had arrived for the second semester. However, delayed course content from the faculty can lead missed deadlines, which again lead to delayed launches or courses starting when they were not complete. This added a great deal of pressure to the faculty authors, designers, and instructors. Two-Week Cycle Model The Two-Week Cycle model allows designers to develop and get each lesson or unit of a course ready for review in two weeks. During the first week of each two-week cycle, designers work closely with faculty in order to get lesson content on time. Then during the second week the design staff mocks up the lesson online and prepares it for review by the faculty. If a Web-based course has twelve lessons, ideally, twenty-four weeks (six months) later, the course should be ready for final review and editing prior to opening. One of the key benefits of the Two Week Cycle model is designers receive content every other week, which keeps things moving. Another benefit is constant communication with faculty, it allows faculty to get each of the lessons in on time, which is the desired goal of the designer. When the designers work with the faculty, the guiding documents to help the faculty get started are provided by the World Campus. The Flexible Design Models In the Two-semester model and Two-week Cycle model, the designers play important role to develop online courses. As new technologies are rapidly developed, more and more departments and students from Penn State express their interests in having online courses. At the same time, more and more faculty expresses their needs to control the course content without through the designers during their online development. To meet the faculty needs, some flexible design models are created to allow the faculty to control the course content. Because during online development, the instructors feel what was current information for students may not be the latest information any more. Thus, they need to update the lesson content through the development. If some flexible design models can be provided for the faculty so that the development can be more effective and efficient, that would make everybody happy. Simple Editor Faculty is an unique group in terms of using technology. After faculty works with an instructional designer for a repeat online course for one semester, he or she should very familiar with the World Campus online course templates. If the same faculty teaches the same course for the second time, he or she may request some minor changes, for example, add more explanation to the lesson content, assignment instructions and assignment rubrics. Most of the lesson content for the World Campus courses is in our server. Before the simple editor is added, the minor changes from the faculty request need to be done by the designers. Some of the faculty don’t want to touch ftp access, but are willing to make minor changes by themselves. If there is a way to allow faculty make minor changes easily and quickly, it will save the time for the faculty to wait for the designers to get back to him or her. Based on the faculty needs, the World Campus adds simple editor to the course in order to meet the faculty needs. The interface of the simple editor is like Word file. After the changes have been made, click on the submission button. The whole process to make minor changes is so easy and quick. Flexible Design Template As more and more faculty express their needs to control the online course by themselves rather than through the designers, the World Campus created Flexible Design template for those faculty who would like to control their online courses by themselves. For this flexible design template, we don’t need to put anything in our server. Instead, we use the Course Management Systems only. The whole course content will be uploaded as one folder. Within that folder, there are following components: • Lesson folders with page files • Flash file to show the interface of table content • Excel sheet file to change the table of content • Images folders for the interface of table content • CSS folder During this session, the presenter will show an example template using Flash and Excel file. When the Flexible Design models are adopted, some issues may raise as well. Thus these issues will be discussed during the presentation. Also the presenter will share the best practice to the audience for the Flexible Design Models.