Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Online Learning Management
Your 5 Best Tips for No-Fail Production
5/1/2008
Anderson's organization offers roughly 400 online courses each semester, and he's seen the online offerings grow from next to nothing in 1999, to what they are today. He says that when educators express interest in starting an online class, he and his staff hold twoday professional development workshops to sit down with the teachers and go over instructional design. The seminars take place twice each year.
"Faculty sometimes have the misconception that they can take what they've been doing for years and shovel it into an online template," he says, noting that far too many online courses are still nothing more than glorified PowerPoint slide decks. "We're out to instruct them otherwise; that online courses are a completely different kind of thing."
During these workshops, Anderson and his staff tutor faculty members about the new approach, encouraging them to share and-yes-reuse and repurpose content, but imploring them to reconceptualize their syllabi around three basic types of interactions:
- Student-to-content interaction, which pertains to the ease with which students can access new concepts and interact with the learning material.
- Student-to-student interaction, such as communication via instant message, chat, and message boards.
- Student-to-instructor interaction, involving everything from ePortfolios to messaging.
Armed with this information, the educators in the workshop then have three months to go off on their own and reformat PowerPoint presentations and syllabi to reflect these new priorities. At the end of the three months, Anderson's staff evaluates the courses and applies pre-established rubrics to the results, to make sure educators have redesigned the syllabi in such a way as to tie information together coherently. Those courses meeting these criteria are moved along the queue toward eventual adoption; those coming up short are sent back to educators for further development.
Recommended Reading
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Enhanced Learning/ Assessment
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: High-Performance Computing
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Interactive, Remote Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Mobile Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
