Module 4: Effective online course design

Best Practices From the OEI Course Design Rubric

The Online Education Initiative (OEI) (Links to an external site.)is a statewide collaboration to improve the access to, and quality of CCC online education. The OEI Course Design Rubric (Links to an external site.) is a recommended instrument and tool for online faculty who are designing, building, or reviewing online courses. During this module, you will be assessing a course you have previously taught or facilitated through the lens of the OEI Course Design Rubric, as well as reading and discussing both you and your colleagues' ideas about the process. The OEI Course Design Rubric evaluates a number of important course design objectives that support learners including:

Supplemental Software

1. Clear explanations of optional and/or required software including any additional costs are provided within the course.
2. Software required to use course materials is listed with links to where it can be captured and installed.
3. Links are located within the course where learners will use the software (i.e., near the materials requiring its use).

Course/Institutional Policies and Support

1. Software used for the course is adequately supported by the institution, including information for students on where they can obtain help.
2. All activities that might create educational records (as defined by the Family Educational Records Privacy Act) or that involve regular effective contact are conducted within district - or college supported systems.
3. Institutional policies, materials, and forms relevant for learner success (for example, plagiarism policies) are clearly labeled and easy to find; links (if present) allow easy navigation from the course to the information and back.
4. Course/instructor policies regarding decorum, behavior, and netiquette are easy to find and written clearly to avoid confusion.
5. Links to institutional services such as the library, or writing center, are clearly labeled and easy to find.

Technical Accessibility

1. Course materials are compliant with Section 508 (Links to an external site.) and WCAG (Links to an external site.) (AA) and can be effectively used with equal ease by all students.
2. All non-text communications technologies support multiple digital channels with automatic provision of alternate media accommodations in real time.
3. Course materials are HTML-based and employ formatting styles to create semantic structure that facilitates consistent meaning and sequencing across all digital media types.
4. All instructional materials can be opened via free and accessible programs or applications, and links are provided for students to download the application with supporting information on how to use the program or application.
5. Quiz and assessment activities can be completed with equal ease via the keyboard and assistive technologies without adding cognitive load, and provide individual student-based parameters for time, number of attempts, feedback, and completion.

Accommodations For Disabilities

1. There are no pedagogically-essential learning activities or instructional media that are inherently inaccessible, or in the presence of such inaccessible materials, a DSPS approved plan for accommodation is in place and ready to be provided as necessary for each inaccessible learning activity or instructional media.
2. Course CMS settings are configurable by faculty to allow individual student-based accommodations to be provided within the CMS.
3. Links to CMS technical support as well as contact information for DSPS support are consistently provided and easy to find, and accompanied by a module within the CMS explaining how to request services or report a problem.
4. An instructional material inventory of any inherently inaccessible learning objects is provided, and referenced to the accompanying course outline with plans for accommodating students with disabilities for each inaccessible learning object or activity.

Throughout this course we've covered several of the learner support items above. Instructors will also find that the Canvas template shell that they receive for their online class includes several of the learner support specific to SDCCD. Keep in mind that the goal is to support your learners' use of the technology in your course. Additional support resources specific to your course may also be necessary for your students' success.

Why Interaction?

Because it's just good teaching no matter what the modality. Back in 1987 Chickering and Gamson identified 7 Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education (Links to an external site.)which include:

1. Encourages contact between students and faculty.
2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students.
3. Encourages active learning.
4. Gives prompt feedback.
5. Emphasizes time on task.
6. Communicates high expectations.
7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

Several of those principles touch on communication and interaction in the learning community. Communication is key to a successful learning experience for our students, whether online or in the classroom. And online students want interaction and community. (Links to an external site.) As online teachers, we must use a different set of tools for achieving that level of interaction that builds community and engagement with our students. Without it, as we learned in Module 1, our students are more likely to drop our class.

And, by the way, online courses by definition include regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor, either synchronously or asynchronously, that's according to the U.S. Department of Education's Federal Regulations. (Links to an external site.)Without that regular and substantive interaction courses are considered correspondence courses which aren't eligible for federal financial aid. If you'd like to dig deeper into DE definitions, we recommend checking out the WCET Frontiers blog (Links to an external site.).

Discussions

Discussions are often the hub for interactions in the online course. If your discussions are ready for a refresher, take a look at the resources we've collected here for ideas:

• Post Once, Reply Twice (Links to an external site.): uninspiring discussion boards and what to do about them
• Why Are My Online Discussions So Boring? (Links to an external site.)
• Pedagogical practices related to learner interaction from the University of Central Florida's Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (Links to an external site.).
• Using a Reflective Online Discussion Activity to Help Students Solidify Learning (Links to an external site.)
• Online Discussions with Clear, Consistent Instructions & A Visual Prompt (Links to an external site.)
• Designing for Quality Discussions with Participation Guidelines (Links to an external site.)
• Communication Skills for Online Learning (13 min video) (Links to an external site.) - a video tutorial to share with your students (from the OEI Online Student Readiness Tutorials (Links to an external site.))

Backwards Design

Think back to when you designed your first course. How did you start the process? How did you decide what to include? It's common to select the textbook first, and then the sequence of the course modules mimics the chapters of the book. Activities are sprinkled in to make the textbook reading interesting, and tests are given at the end of the textbook units with questions from the readings and PowerPoint lectures. The online course is an extension of the textbook chapters and units.

In contrast, backwards design follows this sequence:

1. Stage 1: Identify the outcomes. The outcomes and student learning objectives guide the entire course design process.
2. Stage 2: Determine assessment evidence. How will you, the instructor, know when students are successful in meeting the objectives? What does success look like? Will students be creating portfolios, designing prototypes, writing research papers, or taking tests?
3. Stage 3: Plan instructional experiences. The instructor chooses content and designs learning activities to support their successful completion of the assessment. Resources and activities are intentionally designed to guide students to success.

Notice that assessments are designed before instructional experiences. If you want to keep reading more about this process, we recommend he Understanding By Design (UbD) framework ACSD whitepaper. (Links to an external site.)

Assessment Design

In keeping with the Understanding By Design framework, consider designing your summative assessments first. Summative assessments are generally the bigger projects that wrap up a learning unit. Common kinds of summative assessments include research projects, portfolio presentations, team projects, and final exams. Summative assessments should be designed to show evidence that students have achieved the learning outcome. This means that there should be alignment between the learning outcome and the evidence (the activity that students are completing). Here is an example of a learning objective with a misaligned assessment first and then an aligned assessment.

Learning objective: Discuss leadership strategies

• Misaligned assessment: Multiple-choice quiz with questions about leadership strategies
  • Reason: The multiple-choice quiz doesn't give students the opportunity to discuss, which is the verb in the learning objective.
• Aligned assessment: Group activity: With your group members create a "Leadership Recipe" in GoogleDocs to be shared with the rest of the class on the discussion forum.
  • Reason: The activity gives students two opportunities to discuss, once in their small groups and again on the discussion board with the entire class.

Authentic Vs. Traditional Assessment

Our student learning objectives often start with verbs that demonstrate higher order thinking skills, such as create, analyze, develop, and explain. These would be misaligned if the only evidence we had from students was multiple-choice exams where they are being asked to recall and recognize. While essay questions and research papers do tap into higher order thinking skills, they can privilege native speakers, and preclude students from engaging creatively with the content.

Authentic assessment gives students the opportunity to demonstrate learning while making it relevant and more meaningful for them.

• Blooms Taxonomy infographic (Links to an external site.) from Fractus Learning
• Authentic Assessment Toolbox (Links to an external site.)
• Reimagining Writing (Links to an external site.) - CCC Digital Learning Day presentation:
  • Meg Phelps, Ventura College, shares how she transformed a traditional writing assignment into a project about creativity, digital curation, and writing.
  • Suzanne Wakim, Butte College, answers the question "What would a textbook authored by students look like?"
• Digital Storytelling (Links to an external site.)- CCC Digital Learning Day presentation.

Consider how using more authentic assessments could give student agency and ownership of their own learning. Here's what students in Professor Cara Smulevitz's (Mesa, ARTF) course say about the options that she gives for assessment.

Formative Assessment

Once you've designed your summative assessment for the unit, you'll need to plan the formative assessment activities that you'll be using to guide learners towards success. Formative assessment activities might include discussions, group activities, peer reviews, reflections, quizzes, knowledge checks, paper drafts - anything that will guide students towards achieving success in the summative assessment. To get the most of these formative activities, Wiliam (2013) identified the following five formative assessment strategies for teachers:

1. Clarify learning intentions - state the goals of the activity and provide a rubric aligned with the goals
2. Develop effective activities - use hands-on activities that are aligned to the learning goal
3. Provide feedback - give rich, timely feedback so students can learn from what they put into the activity
4. Encourage collaboration - peer-to-peer interaction is an awesome instructional tool that builds community
5. Encourage metacognition - self-assessment and reflection give students agency and ownership of their own learning process

Summative and formative assessments should be intentionally designed while always keeping in mind the needs of our students on their path to success.

Assessment Resources

• Pedagogical practices related to assessment from the University of Central Florida's Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (Links to an external site.)
• Using Assessment to Improve Instruction (Links to an external site.) (6 minute captioned YouTube video)
• Achieving meaningful online learning through effective formative assessment (Links to an external site.)
• Tips and strategies related to Assessment from @ONE Online Network of Educators (Links to an external site.)
• Formative Assessment that Truly Informs Instruction (Links to an external site.)
• The objective-builder tool from UCF

Backwards Design

Remember those three stages of backwards design? Here's a quick refresher:

· Stage 1: Identify the outcomes.

· Stage 2: Determine assessment evidence.

· Stage 3: Plan instructional experiences.

We're now in Stage 3, planning the content, resources and instruction that students will need to be successful on the assessments. Designing the content for your course, then, becomes one of curation, where you are collecting, refining, and creating content that will support your students' learning.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

As you curate content for your online course be sure to search for the Open Educational Resources for your course materials. OERs are free and include permissions for the 5 R's: reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain copies of the materials.

Starting the Search

The most difficult part of the process is the search for OERs. Here are a few resources to assist you:

• COOL4Ed (Links to an external site.) (California Open Online Library 4 Education)
• CCCOER (Links to an external site.) - Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
• OER Commons (Links to an external site.)
• Open Textbook Library (Links to an external site.)
• OpenStax (Links to an external site.)
• Module 1: Introduction to OER (Links to an external site.) from OER course on OER from Washington State

Copyright

Copyright is an incredibly complex topic, and we aren't going to cover the intricacies in this course. Using OERs is an excellent way of using educational materials legally in our courses!

· SDCCD Copyright BP5750