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Online Faculty Development Course
Different disciplines design and teach courses differently, but there are ways of thinking about course design that can be helpful across campus. "Instructional Design" is the professional practice of drafting and constructing courses wherein learners best meet learning goals and objectives. At many colleges and universities, instructional designers help programs and faculty craft courses. At Canisius, COLI serves in that role.
There are some basic instructional design models that can help you organize a set of learning goals, objectives, content, and activities into an integrated, consistent, and effective course. Below are two models worth considering: ADDIE and Backwards Design.
In actual practice, ADDIE is not a step-by-step process description, since after evaluation you ideally return to earlier stages for improvement.
Backward Design
Backward Design
Another Instructional Design concept, Backward Design, also suggests starting with learning goals. But the next step should be determining when and how students meet the goals. That is, design effective assessments that will show you if students have learned what you think you are teaching. Only after that, should you build the course lessons -select or create content and activities - to get students to those course or learning goals.
Creating assessments that measure performance up front can help you establish exactly what you need to teach on a lesson-by-lesson basis. This can also help you avoid a drift back toward asking students to memorize content, and away from higher forms of learning.
Professor Erica Halverson, University of Wisconsin at Madison explains: (Click "CC" within the video frame for close captions.)
Backwards Design sounds suspiciously like that common complaint heard about teachers, schools, and curriculum generally: "teaching to the test." But what if you and your colleagues (instead of distant bureaucrats) are the ones developing the "test," or your own assessments?
Neither ADDIE nor Backward Design are precise prescriptions for building courses, and they are more or less useful, in very different ways, across disciplines. In this sense, Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI), which we explored in our last lesson, can also be regarded as a sort of instructional design model.
But they can help you intentionally build your course; each part of each lesson is there to serve an explicit purpose, rather than simply because it's what professors have done in your field in the past. With either ADDIE or Backward Design, notice that you are asked to have your learning goals listed as a first step. Practically, you can build or at least sketch in your assessments, as an early step, in accordance with course design. And ADDIE's emphasis on evaluation for the purpose of revision is applicable in any case - few (if any?) professors are perfectly happy with a course the first time they teach it, and many continually revise at least some parts of their courses year-after-year.
In Spring 2020, professors didn't have much time to consider instructional design. They needed to move their face-to-face courses to the web in a hurry. If you are planning a new online, hybrid, or face-to-face course in a future semester, spare some time for course design, and you'll be more satisfied with your course as you teach it the first time, and plan to improve it thereafter.
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