Back to basics: Five fundamental aspects of an online course.

Institutions are finding the transition to meet the demand for online courses challenging. Acclerated online learning can seem to be a revenue generator, but the level of quality and academic rigor must align with accreditation benchmarks and regulations. When faculty who are new to online learning are being required to translate their subject matter expertise to a digital format, they need guidance, without having to spend hours researching or following the lead of other colleagues, who may be confident but unaware of best practices. Institutions can meet regulations and accreditation-level quality by innovating faculty by giving them five measurable benchmarks: 1. Navigation, how students move through the course 2. Content, does it have a variety of multimedia, relevance to the subject and the audience 3. Accessibility, using universal design for learning principles 4. Assessments, a variety of summative assessments; test and retest,  and, 5. Evaluation, how the material resonates with students, and how it can be improved. 

Method/Language: Participants will be given a pre-workshop survey, as a group, the questions will appear on the slide, they will be encouraged to shout out their answers and presenter will capture answers on screen. What do you hope or expect to get out of this workshop? How do you plan (or hope) to apply what you learn?

“I’m going to use three different learning management systems as examples, where I have sandbox courses, to demonstrate some of the tools we will talk about today. I’m going to introduce the topics and ask for a show of hands for who is interested in each topic. You can raise your hand for more than one, or all, if you are interested in all of them. Our workshop, after I go over the five fundamentals, will be to break up into five groups, one for each aspect. Each group will have time to discuss and build a list of challenges and solutions for their fundamental aspect of an online course. Then we will come back to the larger group and each group will share their lists. 

“1. Navigation. (assess interest) How students move through the course. Students who matriculate into a program have a certain level of expectation when a course first opens. If they land on a page and read, “No recent messages…” because the landing page hasn’t been set to a page that provides them with a map, it can be discouraging upon the very first log-in. Never mind every log in throughout the semester or term. Sure some students will get used to it, and ignore it, similar to how most people breeze through the “Terms of Acceptance” before signing up for anything. Students should be greeted in their online class with a clear set of directions, that is consistent from course to course. Academic freedom should not hinder or impede the ability for an institution to encourage faculty to use a consistent method of navigation within their Learning Management System. (Request stories from the audience, and provide 2 examples on-screen). 

“2. Content. (assess interest) This is to be expected. Clearly, an online course needs content, right? Yes, this was intended to be obvious, but also a way to think about the different types of content available to include online. There are myriad considerations when it comes to content, copyright being one of them. That is an entire presentation in and of itself, so I will not spend a lot of time on the subject although you are welcome to discuss it in the content group. Content needs to be engaging. We can’t simply require students to read a chapter or two and write a summary, the discuss it in class. You’ll have students logging only 12 hours in a forum where there should be 45 documented hours, according to some regulations.  (Ask audience to name types of content, build next bit of presentation based on their examples, using screen to demostrate) There are ways to build engaging online content that will keep the student in the learning management system. Embed your videos instead of hyperlinking to an external site. Build in quizzes with unlimited attempts, then make your exams, mid-term and final, in essay format with the built-in test making tool. We will go over that a little more in Assessments. Allow students to work in groups using the built-in collaborative synchronous meeting tool. They can record their presentation together and you can post it for asynchronous viewing (demonstrate different tools). It needs to be relevant to your audience, accessible, and that brings us to the next topic.

“3. Accessibility. (assess interest) The liability involved by excluding students with disabilities is not worth the short time it takes to make sure your content is accessible with captions and transcripts. This can be an incentive to keep your video lectures short and sweet. Many people may already be aware that the attention span of an online student can be as short as 2.5 minutes. PDFs. Scanned documents must be readable. Please use your devices in your groups to look up different tools that are relevant to your fundamental aspect.

“4. Assessments. This is about summative assessments. (assess interest) How do you know what your students have learned? Are they absorbing the content. Are they doing anything to prove that they are integrating the information? It can’t all be papers and exams, right? (participation: shout outs). This group will be tasked with coming up with at least five other forms of summative assessment, test and retest.  

“5. Evaluation. This is about formative assessments, how your course can be improved. Student surveys (assess interest). We’re going to figure out how to best conduct these surveys. Importance emphasized should be on reliability; do your questions elicit the information you want. A likert scale 1-5 how much did you enjoy this class, doesn’t really give you what you want to know. Sometimes we don’t really want to know, but we need to know, your administrators need to know, this is the evidence we need to see what works and what doesn’t.” 

Learning Objectives: 

• After the initial presentation, discuss one of the fundamentals of a successful online course with colleagues
• In the small group, using the internet and personal experience, build a list of ways the fundamental aspect of an online class can be designed to engage students in the learning management system
• Share with the large group the small group findings in order for the presenter to share the presentation and findings post presentation

Small Group work (25-30 minutes): Participants will break into fairly even numbered groups based on the level of interest in each topic and given that at least one person in each group has fast service on a device for research online. Presenters will visit each group and ask about progress, providing help, clues, direction, if necessary. Groups will likely come up with far more solutions that prepared in the conclusion of the presentation, which may be a positive way to encourage post-presentation community building, multi-institutional collaboration in the future.

Materials: Pads of paper & pends

Tools: Personal mobile devices & wifi

Focus: Collaborative solution building  

Regroup, Reflection, survey (25-30 Minutes): Groups will report back to the larger discussion. While each group shares, the presenter will edit the slide presentation going over the fundamentals prepared and any new ideas developed in the small groups. In Navigation, Content, and Assessment, emphasis will be on adaptivity. In Accessibility, emphasis will be on as many different tools that the group found, including costs, if possible; but if they do not find it on their own, the free online document converters. The tools that can turn a word document into a new file type including mp3s. Assessment should also cover remote proctoring tools, but shift back to the importance of teaching learners to find their resources. Finally, bringing the conversation full circle when the evaluation group shares. The importance of pre-course surveys. Pre-course surveys, much like the questions in the introduction of the workshop, gives the learner a voice right up front, or at least a venue to share his or her distaste for being required to take a course. One of the first things a learner should see, besides the syllabus, is a pre-course survey that includes questions such as: what do students expect to get out of the class, how do they plan to apply the knowledge, and what do they already know about the topic? When students have an opportunity to consider the potential of the course topic, it will either let them free-style respond, or encourage them to read the syllabus thoroughly. This can be private instructor-learner interaction, anonymous, or discussion based for peer evaluated moocs.

Participants will complete a google form survey, a formative assessment of the workshop, how it can be improved. The presenters will send the presentation and results via e-mail following the conference.