While supporting academic staff with ERT we also had a number of staff interested in developing online short courses and postgraduate programmes. We designed and taught an online short course RU Online Course Design 12 that ran from 13 July to 20 August 2020. While we had 24 participants, some were members of course teams and later elected for one or two members to participate in the course given other commitments. Unlike ERT, online courses require systematic planning and design. This professional development opportunity can also be seen in relation to community engagement as some participants were designing online offerings towards their community engagement work, or in the process of thinking about it for online courses for mainstream or short course students, but saw the relevance thereof for designing broader community-facing engagements online.
Our pre-course survey showed that this group of participants had diverse experiences of previous use of RUconnected and online courses more generally. The purpose of the course was communicated as follows:
This online course is designed to support colleagues at Rhodes University who are designing online courses. The aim of this course is to build a community of practice around online course design, to learn about online course design through experience of this course and to apply approaches, tools and principles to your own online course.
Colleagues worked on authentic activities throughout the course and received feedback from ourselves and fellow lecturers during weekly Zoom meetings. We encouraged them to see this as a safe space, a learning community and to share and inspire each other. For many this was their first time making an introductory course video, writing a course brochure, designing online activities, etc. I have chosen to share a letter from Sukh Mantel (Senior Researcher based at the Institute for Water Research), in the Community Engagement section of this portfolio instead of here.
Lecturers reported that they found the following aspects of the course most beneficial:
Tips and assistance with materials development
Advice on brochure, videos etc. Lessons learnt
Sharing ideas with other people who are working on online courses. Tips and ideas from the facilitators.
Course design has been very useful to me (especially the backward course design) and the resources that support the work. The course has opened my eyes to a whole lot of resources and tools to support online course design. Knowing the best practices was also extremely useful.
The insights from other colleagues and shared resources.
The importance of course mapping and the different tools you can use depending on your learning objectives. Essentially a learning strategy.
Guidance and examples of how to create the course
Anonymous feedback from lecturers at the end of the course included:
‘I'm really enjoying working on this course as a community. It gives me a good sense of what other teachers do and how they share and design materials.’
‘Thank you for the time and effort that you have both put into this course. I have really enjoyed the connections with other lecturers and with you.’
‘You are doing a great job Nicola. Excellent voice projection and well-paced course.’
Evidence of effective planning and teaching can be gleaned from our RUconnected site that contains links to our presentations, YouTube channel, etc. This link is accessible to RU users only.