This session presents a “layered course development framework" that guided the collaborative, 12-week, high-quality online course development process among faculty and instructional designers. Best practices applying the framework to online course design aligned to Quality Matters will be presented.
Recent demands for high quality online education require that institutions of higher education provide support for faculty to advance their skills in online course design and development. High quality online education requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content, and pedagogy (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey, & Peruski, 2004). Traditional approaches to faculty development such as short workshops, seminars, or webinars are useful for providing introductory conceptual knowledge on online instructional strategies and technology tools, but are often insufficient for faculty whose needs require a deeper understanding of the relationship between technology, content, and pedagogy that come together in the larger tasks of course planning, design, and development of fully online courses.
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has responded to the needs of faculty who are ready and willing to teach online by offering a more productive faculty development program. In the Summer of 2017, the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), in partnership with Distance Education, initiated a program where faculty and instructional designers participated in a 12-week collaborative online course development process that integrated multiple strategies known to be successful for faculty development (Menges, 1994) such as: (a) workshops and seminars; (b) one-on-one consultations; (c) grants for instructional improvements; (d) learning resources, and (e) colleagues helping colleagues. Each faculty was primarily partnered with an instructional designer throughout the 12-week process to plan, design, and develop an online course aligned to the Quality Matters rubric.
This session presents best practices from applying our “layered framework" that guided the collaborative course development process throughout the 12 weeks. The framework emphasizes a systematic ‘way of thinking’ and ‘way of working’ through the course development process, initiated with an analysis of the learner context and content before designing the learning experience, course navigation and aesthetics. The layered approach also integrates components of the Quality Matters rubric to ensure a seamless alignment for high quality course design.