Instructional designers know good course design, but guiding faculty through the process of creating quality online courses can still be challenging. The presenter will provide tested strategies instructional designers can use to guide faculty through a course design process that is fun and engaging, without losing track of effective design.
If you are an instructional designer, creating engaging quality courses is just part of who you are. You’ve memorized the standards, know the best online instructional tool for any situation and have a collection of favorite rubrics in a folder for easy reference. But what happens when you are tasked with guiding faculty subject matter experts through the process of online course design? How can instructional designers facilitate a process that is fun and engaging, allows faculty to maintain ownership and autonomy, while keeping course design standards and best practices at the forefront?
In this session, the presenter will walk participants through course design facilitation strategies that have been tried, tested, reflected on and improved with over 50 faculty course designers in the development of more than 75 online and hybrid courses. The presenter will share activities used with new faculty course designers as part of a formal online course development process consisting of four workshops. The workshops were developed and modified over a five year period in order to help mitigate various issues experienced while working as an instructional designer to facilitate the online course development process with a faculty audience that was completely new to online course design and instruction. Successes and failures as well as common pitfalls will all be discussed.
The presenter will demonstrate hands-on activities that support a wide variety of skills and competencies needed by faculty subject matter experts in order to design quality online courses, such as writing learning outcomes, maintaining alignment between outcomes, resources and assessment, assignment design, using instructional technology tools and incorporating effective facilitation strategies into the design of the course. The activities are designed in such a way that not only shows faculty how to implement best practices of online course design, but also encourages faculty to internalize and value these practices.
Wrapping things up, the presenter will also share her experiences with how implementation of these activities has paid dividends in increasing the overall quality of online courses and decreasing frustration on the part of instructional designers and faculty course developers during each stage of the course design process.
Participants will walk away with a comprehensive course design facilitation toolkit to implement on their campus and will also have opportunities to share additional strategies and ideas to contribute to the toolkit.