Designing Online Learning for Multiple Audiences and Platforms

Conceptualizing, Designing and Developing university core online courses often requires deliberate planning and time. A significant amount of time is spent on creation of online materials, such as lecture videos, audio and accessible documents. Even though, it may seem fairly simple to reuse the learning materials for different audiences, this proves to be a difficult task. Depending on the learner characteristics and demographics, it often requires significant redesigning. It will be helpful for an instructor as well as the course designer if some of the contents can be reused while making necessary design modifications, such as changing assessments and aligning them with the the learning outcomes. This presentation will highlight the strategies used and lessons learned during designing a Spanish film studies course for different learners and platforms.

Purdue University’s Online Learning  team collaborated with the Teaching and Learning Technologies team to offer several core courses online. This session will particularly highlight on one such specific course that has been offered to different audiences, such as undergraduates, Graduates, Indiana High School teachers and also for the learners in a massive open online course platform (FutureLearn MOOC). The presentation will cover several topics, such as the the rationale for offering this course online, the learner characteristics and demographics for different offerings of the course, challenges for each types of offerings, engaging learners on each platforms, creating instructor presence, addressing accessibility, copyrights, universal design related issues and other the course design and redesign strategies that were adopted and modified. The projects involved a team of two instructional designers, a graphic designer, multimedia developers, accessibility and copyright experts and the faculty (SME) teaching the course.

Engagement Strategies: 

The presentation will consist of the following engagement strategies:

• To gain learner attention and set the tone of the presentation, the presenters will conduct an initial online poll to asses the audience's experience with designing, teaching, developing or taking online film courses on multiple platforms including MOOCs

• The presenters will demonstrate the common strategies for designing the online film course based on research and best practices. More specifically, by providing brief overviews of the courses on different platforms, they will illustrate how the assessment techniques, delivery methods and design structures have been modified whenever the audiences and platforms were changed.

• The presenters will propose a hypothetical instructional problem related to designing an online film course in a different language. The audiences will be asked to share some effective learner engagement strategies and identify appropriate technologies to foster learner to learner interactions. Also, they will be asked if the can foresee any institution specific challenges that may hinder the course development and delivery.

• Using another hypothetical situation in an online platform, presenters will also provide and discussion prompt where they will ask the audiences to think, pair and share some assessment strategies that they think are most effective in such a case. The presenters will also ask the audience to share how differently they will design the assessment if the platform changes (for example: from a regular for credit course hosted in a close LMS platform to a MOOC platform.

• Presenters will share hypothetical scenarios on the Fair Use and Copyright issues for online Film courses and check the audience’s understanding using a poll.

• Finally, using examples from Purdue University, the presenters will share how an effective and agile redesign as well as  reuse of instructional materials can help not only with course design and delivery but also with revenue generation and increased student enrolments.

Learning Outcomes

1. By the end of the session, the audience will be able to describe the essential elements and list of steps for an effective and engaging online online film course design, development and delivery.

2. By the end of the session, the audience will be able to recognize the differences in strategies needed to address the challenges for a traditional ‘closed’ courses and a massive open online courses.

3. By the end of the session, the audience will be able to identify limitations for educational usage of copyrighted multimedia materials across multiple platforms.

4. By the end of the session, the audience will be able to determine, modify and apply the design and assessment strategies for creating online courses for various learners and platforms depending on their respective institutions