Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello. I'm Andrea Milligan from Academic Technology. Lance Eaton and I are members
of the Instructional Technology and Design team here at North Shore.
We work with faculty members to create online and hybrid courses.
Designing and teaching online or hybrid courses can be very rewarding;
however, it is not for everyone.
To help you decide on whether teaching online or in a hybrid format is for you,
we'd like to explain the process for designing courses here at North Shore
and talk about what it takes to create and to teach an online or hybrid course.
We encourage you to take a readiness survey designed by Penn State
if you're interested in submitting a Technology Across the Curriculum
(or TAC) grant this year.
We can then review the survey results with you
and discuss your level of readiness
for designing and teaching an online or hybrid course.
The link to the survey is provided at the end of this presentation.
In this presentation,
I'll cover four items.
First, I'll describe the course design and development process at North Shore.
Second, I'll tell you about the benefits of going through the course design
process.
Third, I'll describe what we have found and the research states to be useful skills and
characteristics
for prospective online and hybrid instructors.
And last, I'll describe some of the challenges instructors typically
encounter
while designing a course.
This is an overview of the North Shore course development process.
After viewing this presentation,
taking the readiness survey, and talking to an instructional designer and your dean,
you would submit and get approval for a TAC grant.
After your TAC grant has been selected,
the design and development process begins in December
with our online course: Teaching and Learning Online.
The learning goals for teaching and learning online are: One,
to begin to learn how to design an online course.
Two, to get experience as an online student.
Three, to learn some best practices of online teaching.
And finally, four, to begin to build parts of your course.
The course is designed partly around case studies of typical challenges online
teachers have
and includes readings, discussion forums, and assignments.
Immediately after the end of the course,
you'll meet with an instructional designer to plan your online course.
In the initial meetings, we discuss the broad goals of your course
and lay out a draft plan to complete the work.
The design and development process is a long process.
Designing a course requires a lot of planning,
including a reflection on your current teaching practice
and making challenging conceptual adjustments
in order to transition a course to these new formats.
It's really a redesign
more than a simple translation
to a new environment.
There are deadlines or milestones to meet along the way.
One is for the first completed module.
Then there are milestones for about one third of the course,
two-thirds of the course
and lastly the course does have to be complete before teaching.
Finally, teaching the course for the first time can be challenging
but we are available for assistance.
We run workshops throughout the semester
and can meet one-on-one during that time.
Let me now review some of the benefits of designing an online course
and what you learn during that process.
The pedagogy of online teaching -
As I mentioned earlier, teaching online is different in significant ways.
As you participate in our online course and work with us in the following six
months after that
you'll learn quite a bit about the this mode of teaching.
Instructional design -
The need to design nearly everything ahead of time time
and design with course outcomes and goals in mind at the beginning
is a new way to build a course for many instructors.
Going through a formal design process
can enhance your ability to design and redesign any course
whether face-to-face, web supported,
hybrid, or online.
And many faculty members report to us that this experience has enhanced their
teaching in general.
Best practices -
We do have a list of best practices for instructional design of online and hybrid
courses that we try to adhere to as we design the courses together.
During the TLO course, we'll provide you with a copy of the current version
of our best practices.
The best practices are outlined in five different categories.
Course design and structure -
Each module or unit learning sequence needs to be consistent.
Course materials -
Each module contains a learning guide.
Assessment strategies -
Assessments are varied, frequent,
and specific
and descriptive criteria are provided for the evaluation of student work or
participation.
Learner engagement -
Learner activities foster instructor to student,
content to student, and student to student interaction.
Alignment of objectives, assessments and activities -
All assessments and activities should align with learning objectives.
There's also an additional category for hybrid courses.
Our best practices are based on the Quality Matters standards.
Quality Matters is a nationally recognized research based set of
standards for online and hybrid course design.
As you grapple with course redesign,
you'll be working with us to make decisions about what technology to use
and how to use it to best fit with your goals.
This problem solving process is a key component of becoming fluent
with the integration of technology into teaching and learning.
And these skills can go a long way to enhancing all of your courses.
And finally technology skills -
You do gain skills using technology during the process.
We can give you tips on using ANGEL to fit with your course design
and teaching style.
You may also want to use other tools to enhance your course and to engage
your students.
For example,
audio and video narrated slide shows like this one, collaborative tools
and so on.
These are some skills and characteristics
we found useful over the years for online instructors.
Writing skills and written communications -
Course design and teaching requires quite a bit of writing.
Most if not all communications right now are written in online courses
so clarity, organization, and timeliness of these communications is very
important.
Organization -
The whole course needs to be constructed before teaching
so planning and organizational skills are needed.
We do everything we can to assist you in organizing your work but being organized
with file management and use of your time will help tremendously.
If you're already using learner centered teaching practices or
are willing to adjust, this helps tremendously moving to the online world.
What does learner center teaching mean?
It means mostly moving towards becoming more of a guide than a sage on the stage
or the expert.
So you will not be lecturing as much and being open to making that move will
help.
Information technology fluency -
You don't need high-level technology skills.
Being comfortable with certain information technologies
makes the learning curve flatter.
Samples skills include file management,
basic troubleshooting of computer problems,
being comfortable with uploading and downloading files, and so on.
Flexibility -
This helps for several reasons.
First, in order to design an online course, you will have to fit your teaching
into a very regular pattern
so students can follow more easily on their own.
And second, when glitches happen with technology as they often can do,
flexibility responding to these kinds of things is important.
The process includes deadlines during the semester
and in the summer
and we find this helps most faculty members.
In order to create a high-quality course, it's important to be reflective and be
open to feedback and revision of ideas and course materials.
This is especially true in the early phases of design when we discuss your
teaching,
your course goals,
and your teaching style.
We want to help you make your course truly reflect your values, goals, and
teaching style.
So what are the challenges of designing and teaching an online course?
Designing and teaching these courses does not simply involve moving some or all of your
face to face materials online.
It requires true redesign,
a rethinking of the course from the learner's perspective.
One common example that might illustrate this issue is one we often
discuss with teachers -
what happens to your lecture?
In a hybrid course, the face-to-face time is not necessarily best used for lecture.
And in a fully online course,
you wouldn't necessarily simply post lecture notes online nor would you want
to record all of your lectures and post those.
There are faculty who are challenged by the adjustments needed to be made to their
teaching methods.
Your roles as a teacher will change.
Learners move to the center
and the instructor moves a bit to the side and serves as more of a facilitator.
Attempting to teach as you do in the classroom will simply not be very
effective in the online environment.
You have to think differently about time when designing an online
course.
The online course is not centered on the face to face meeting.
It's more focus on learning events especially on assessments of student
learning.
One example to illustrate this is the challenge of time shifts.
When designing an online course,
You want to ensure that all the most important
advice, instructions, examples make it into your course in some form.
These tend to happen orally in the traditional classroom
and they are spread out overtime throughout the semester.
So it is challenging to gather all of these together
and put them into a course in a cohesive organized fashion.
Designing an online or hybrid course requires that you really dig into
learning activities and assessments -
in many cases re-design them
not just move them into an online environment.
Designing an online or hybrid course is in act of authorship.
You have to do a fair amount of writing.
Part of that writing involves bringing your personality and your style to the course.
And clarity of writing is very important both in the design and teaching phases.
There's a fair amount of work involved and the deadlines requiring that some of
this is done during the summer
and some during the semester.
As you can probably see by now
with online and hybrid courses
almost everything is prepared ahead of time.
The whole course has to be complete before you teach -
every lecture,
assessment, rubric,
set of guidelines and so on.
Here's our contact information.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the online and hybrid
course design and development process.
And if you take the Penn State Faculty Self-Assessment on Preparing for Online
Teaching,
this is the address at which to find it at.
We'd be happy to discuss the results with you
and we look forward to working with you.