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Saturday, September 30, 2006
Week 6 Chapter 3 Course Development
Instructional Design for an online course must planned out in a similar way to a traditional-style class in that you need to outline the needs of your learners, your goals and objectives, assignments, readings or "lecture", assessment and grading rubric. This quotation is from Standards for Quality Online Courses ( http://standards.mivu.org/) : "Understanding our Instructional Design Standards we approach the process of designing and evaluating the Instructional Design of a course from a Performance Objective standpoint. In other words, online courses can be broken down into Units and Objectives." This shows the similarity in instructional design of both traditional and online classes. The difference will be in how you deliver the material and especially in the use of online learning tools. You simply cannot take the syllabus from a traditional class and type it into the web. Classroom tools will not necessarily translate to the online classroom. For example, when using a discussion tool or chat tool, the rules for discussion and chat must be layed out ahead of time for the students. As a facilitator, you cannot redirect conversation as easily in asynchronous conversation. Also, specific guidlines must be published so the students will have a greater understanding of what is expected. You must also narrow the topic or give guidlines on the topic so that precious time and space is not wasted on non-specifics to the assignment.
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2 comments:
I know it is a small part of your post but I think it is important to mention the grading rubric. This is one thing that I have found particularly helpful so far this semester. As a learner, I have found that having a rubric has helped me tremendously in my assignments. There has even been a few instances where I have finished an assignment and then checked the rubric to make sure everything was ok and realized that I had left out an important part of the assignment. It is a very helpful tool for the students to follow and will also benefit the teacher by knowing that all possible information has been given to the student to help them do the best that he/she can. The University of Wisconsin has a list of rubrics that can be used as an outline for a variety of different courses at http://www.uwstout.edu/soe/profdev/rubrics.shtml.
I appreciated Kate's and Marianne's comments. Regarding the rubrics, I agree with Marianne that there are times when the rubric becomes the guide for what you have to do. It's a great way to be able to get an A in a class. Just follow the rubric. If I had taken all my high school and undergraduate classes online I think I would have had all 4.0s. I think the reason I am having such a great graduate experience is because I know exactly what is due when and I usually have a sample of how to do the assignment!
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