This presentation will focus on the importance of collaboration of an instructional design team and faculty members that teach in an online program. The working relationship between these two facets have brought up the quality of each of the courses taught as well as making all the courses for the program equitable in time and work.
According to Singh and Hurley (2017), it is imperative that universities routinely conduct comprehensive assessments of their online courses. These assessments are conducted to ensure that all the courses that are being offered online are of the same high quality and rigor as a face-to-face course. In fact, Southard & Mooney (2015) found that while the delivery of an online course is important, courses that take into account both design, and delivery elements with design elements being more heavily represented, have better student engagement. With this in mind, the University of Wisconsin-Stout Online’s Instructional Design Team along with the Department Human Development and Family Studies online program work collaboratively each year on a new quality initiative.
In 2015, an initiative was proposed that all core courses in the HDFS program would be condensed from the 16-week format to an 8-week format. A rise in condensed delivery was seen in online programs, as many administrators at universities believe that offering more online courses in a compressed format will increase enrollment (Dobbs, Ward, & del Carmen 2009; Li & Irby, 2008). The HDFS program ran a pilot that was implemented in the spring of 2015 that converted all the courses in the program from 16 weeks to an 8-week format. This pilot was intended to last for 2 years (4 semesters) and at the end of the fall semester, a survey would be distributed to all online students in the program as well as the faculty who teach in the online program. In November of 2017, data was collected to examine if students and faculty preferred the 8 weeks or the 16-week course format. Results showed that students and faculty both agreed that they liked the pace of the 16-week courses better and students reported that they retained the knowledge better when it was more spread out. This is in line with what Davies (2006) revealed, that many students have stated concern about the amount of material covered during the shorter time. With that information, a decision was made to return to a 16-week course format. UW-Stout Online’ s ID team was to assist with the 16-week conversion process to make sure that the quality of the courses would still be intact as well as making sure that all of the courses offered were equitable.
The ID team’s focus was on making sure that when the courses were distributed to 16 weeks, the activities were balanced, consistent in workload, and were structured in a way that was fitting with the course level and student needs. Students in courses with appropriate workloads receive better grades and give more positive course ratings, according to Greenwald and Gillmore (1997). First, a ‘time audit’ was completed on each of the courses. The ID team took the previous 8-week versions of the courses and created an inventory of the course activities and content that a student would need to do to be successful and engaged within the course. Once all the course materials were listed out, multiple tools to calculate how long each activity would take for someone with an average writing speed and reading speed. While this process is of course not exact, using values that include the time needed for reading, reflecting, note-taking, etc. help to recognize overloaded weeks that can modified in the curriculum design, as noted by Chambers (1992).
Once the course work had been calculated the ID team created a report of the results to help ourselves and our faculty better visualize what the report meant for the course. While the spreadsheets of this raw data were detailed and informative, they were not useful in making course decisions at the macro level. The ID team created a document for the faculty, simply called their “8-Week Course Report”. Graphs and charts were utilized to examine the overall trendlines of the course workload. The material in the report looked at questions such as: Where were students busiest? Were there spikes or drops in the course workload from week to week? The ID team looked for the same trendlines for specific course material types as well, broken down into “reading”, “watching”, and “Doing”. Again, this helped to answer the questions such as: Were there weeks where there was much more reading than average? Weeks dropped off or dipped in activity time? Weeks with a lot of videos to watch? Pie charts were also included that showed the proportion of the activity types to each other, showing if there was a consistently balanced amount of reading, watching, and activities, or if the proportion of each fluctuated from week. Making sure that changes in workload were gradual and balanced play a factor in student perception of their workload, according to Kember (2004).
The final part of this report included feedback on how the course could be improved when getting moved into 16 weeks. The most common suggestion was chunking large projects into smaller milestones to help students in lower-level course learn better project management skills. This report was included in a packet with the course’s raw data spreadsheet, a letter explaining the process, and then a template that would help faculty to begin distributing course material into 16 weeks.
At this point, only 4 of the courses have been through this process. The rest of the core courses are scheduled for assessment in the summer and fall of 2018. Once all core courses of the HDFS program has been assessed using this method, all the courses will be analyzed, looking at trends of how much time a student can expect to spend in a 1, 2 or 3 credit hour course. It is important for students to have consistency of workload across all courses. Our plan would be to have that data to share if chosen to present.
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Davies, W. M. (2006). Intensive teaching formats: A review. Issues in Educational Research, 16, 1–21.
Dobbs, R., Ward, C., & del Carmen, A. (2009). Students’ perceptions of online courses: Theffect of online course experience. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 10, 9–26.
Greenwald, A. G., & Gillmore, G. M. (1997). No pain, no gain? the importance of measuring course workload in student ratings of instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(4), 743-751.
Kember, D. (2004). Interpreting student workload and the factors which shape students' perceptions of their workload. Studies in Higher Education., 29(2), 165-184.
Li, C., & Irby, B. (2008). An overview of online education: Attractiveness, benefits, challenges, concerns, and recommendations. College Student Journal, 42, 449–458.
Singh, R. & Hurley, D. (2017) The Effectiveness of Teaching and Learning Process in Online Education as Perceived by University Faculty and Instructional Technology
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Southard, S., & Mooney, M. (2015). A comparative analysis of distance education quality assurance standards. The Quarterly Review of Distance Education