Professional Development

New Certificate Program Trains in Online Instructional Design

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 12/06/16

The Online Learning Consortium (OLC) is working with instructional design experts from the State University of New York to help people in higher education hone their skills in instructional design for online courses.

The new "Instructional Designer Certificate Program," which encompasses four online courses, will be taught by members of the staff at the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence (COTE). Open SUNY is a cross-collaboration project to create services that support faculty from all of SUNY's campuses. COTE is dedicated to helping educators and others in SUNY bolster their online instructional practices. OLC is an organization that focuses on delivering professional development related to online teaching.

The new certificate program officially kicks off in January 2017. However, enrollees of the $1,499 program may choose to take the courses in any order over one year; each class will be offered twice during the coming year. They may also sign up for individual courses at $400 apiece and extend the timeline to two years if they wish to earn a certificate. Each course lasts four weeks, and the OLC recommends that participants have at least a year of experience in supporting online course design and development in an instructional design capacity, whether as an instructional designer, librarian or faculty member.

The four subjects to be explored are:

• Helping faculty with new course development;
• Creating useful resources for faculty;
• Collaborating, researching and networking; and
• Course quality review using Open SUNY's own Course Quality Review (OSCQR) rubric and process.

A webinar Dec. 14 at 2 p.m. Eastern will provide more details about the certificate program.

In the future, the OLC will work with Open SUNY on an open educational resources workshop, also to be delivered in 2017.