How to Develop Your Online Course
This document has been prepared to assist faculty members who are considering teaching online. It has been prepared from the experiences of faculty and staff who have been teaching online. The guidelines are intended to be helpful and effort saving. These are only suggestions and not intended to limit your creativity and academic freedom.
A special thanks to all those faculty and staff who have and continue to contribute to our understanding of how to successfully teach online.
STEP 1: LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP
Consider these things.
•Do I have a computer (preferably a PC) in my office that is at least a Pentium III with at least 64 MB of RAM?
•Am I familiar with basic PC skills? (file structure, copying, moving files, keyboard and mouse functions, screen and windows features, etc.)
•Can I create and manipulate documents (formatting, copying, pasting, attaching and retrieving them)?
•Am I willing to learn new software applications (Desire2Learn) needed for teaching on the Web?
•Have I taken an online course?
•Have I looked at online courses of other faculty teaching at the College?
•Am I prepared to invest the effort and time needed to deliver a course online?
•Will using this technology help me reach the students I teach more effectively?
Faculty should answer "yes" to all of the questions above when deciding to build an online course. If a faculty member answers "no" to any of these questions they should contact the campus faculty trainer to decide what steps they should take to proceed.
STEP 2: GET TO KNOW THE PEOPLE YOU'LL NEED TO KNOW.
•Teaching online requires the assistance and support of a number of people throughout the College. Get to know them and let them know about you so they can help.
•Department Chair - Faculty should contact their department chair first. They will need to approve the course before it can be offered online.
•Division Dean-- The division dean will also have to provide approval for the course.
•Office of Distance Learning - The distance learning staff will need to know that you are planning on going "online" in order to coordinate account and course information, to support you in your endeavor, and to market your course through the publications of the college.
STEP 3: MASTER THE SOFTWARE YOU WILL NEED TO DELIVER YOUR COURSE.
•Online courses are delivered to a computer screen by means of one or more authoring software products. Choose what fits your needs and works most efficiently.
•Decide how you plan to develop and deliver your course.
•Mastering these tools comes in stages, so learn what you need to get your course up and running effectively and then look for ways to refine and polish it. The College has regular training in Desire2Learn and provides templates and model pages to simplify some of the work involved. These aids are ways to save time, not limit your creativity. Make your course work, then make it better and better.
•Part of deciding how you want to build your course will involve looking at what others have done. Pick those strategies and techniques that will work for you. We all bring different talents to the table. We operate at different speeds, using different methodologies. Be yourself.
•Take care in the beginning with the structure and design of your course. You do not want to be online too soon, nor do you want to take forever to build the perfect course. It takes about a semester to build your first online course.
STEP 4: PLAN TO WORK AT SCHOOL AND FROM HOME
•Online learning is asynchronous -- students do it when they can and want to interact with you when they need you.
•Most of the online faculty have a computer, the software needed and dial up access for interacting with students at home. If you have an ISP or dial up at your home, you will be able to continue to work on your web site in Desire2Learn.
•Faculty must be very familiar with e-mail. This will be the most common means of communication with students.
•Faculty must be familiar with Internet Explorer (I.E.) 4.0 or greater or Netscape Navigator 4.0 or greater. Earlier versions are not supported.
•Faculty must possess good PC skills.
•Faculty should understand Bandwidth and Dial-Up Connections. A working knowledge of these two things will allow faculty members to understand how the course is transmitted via the WWW and give them some flexibility in helping their students with some of their problems.
•In designing a course, faculty will be considering Asynchronous, Synchronous, or a hybrid of the two delivery methods. For example, the online Intermediate Algebra course is basically Asynchronous, where the student can interact with the class notes, take a self-grading practice quiz, enter into a class discussion, or take an electronic test at any time. There are also synchronous features to the online algebra course such as Net Meetings with whiteboard and sound (even video). These functions allow the instructor to teach a lesson or have virtual class with one or more online students.
•Live chats are recommended but not required.
STEP 5: KNOW THE MEDIUM YOU ARE WORKING IN
•How fast it works and how good it looks depends on what the student is using on his/her end and the way the WEB works. The WEB is not exactly like lecturing, using a blackboard, or writing a textbook.
•Faculty should understand Bandwidth and Dial-Up Connection speeds. A working knowledge of these two things will allow faculty members to understand the limits on the amount of information (words, pictures, video and sound) that can be pushed across the WEB and pulled down by their students. The last hundred feet of your course is probably a piece of telephone wire with a limit of 56KB per second. (For more information see Need a Handout on this)
•Browser windows on different types of machines have much to do with the appearance and functionality of your material.
•Your computer and computing environment is probably not like the ones your students are using.
•At work, you are using a LAN (local area network) and things run as fast and look as good as they can. When you log on using a modem and an older computer, you get a better sense of what your students see and experience.
•You have to weigh how important something is against how much time it takes to transmit and receive it and whether or not the user can see and hear exactly the way you intended.
STEP 6: TEACHING IS HELPING STUDENT TO LEARN
An online environment is just a different kind of classroom for interacting with students.
•Faculty must deliver the same content in an online course as they would in a classroom section of the same course. This is very important. If the course differs from the on-campus version it must presented to the Curriculum Committee for approval. The online course should have the same course content with different delivery style.
•Faculty must provide students a detailed course syllabus. See Syllabus Requirements. The course syllabus must be available on public pages for prospective students so they can see what they are getting into in advance. This syllabus can be an abbreviated version. It is maintained in a folder created by the Webmaster's office and should be submitted to them by the faculty member early in the development process.
•Faculty should clearly define any prerequisites. Make sure the students understand what they will need in order to take the course (in terms of previous course work, computer skills, hardware and software requirements).
•Faculty must provide students with clear communication about expectations, instructions about activities, assignments, deadlines, and announcements
•Faculty teaching online must have a personal homepage that provides contact information, office hours, office location and information that would assist the student in working with the faculty member.
•Faculty teaching online courses must provide students with timely feedback on assignments and grades as well as responses to questions and requests for assistance. Online students need feedback more than traditional students. The faculty member is responsible for finding out students' telephone numbers and e-mail addresses at the beginning of the course. This will help to eliminate some common problems. (Advisors are supposed to tell students that the instructor will not call them, but this is not always the case.)
•Online students must have proper advising and the support of the Student Services office. Provide sound advising for students. Online courses are not for everybody. All students taking online courses should get advising assistance from online faculty.
• Students should be properly oriented to the online course setting and your course specifically.
STEP 7: COURSE DESIGN -- IT'S ALL ABOUT CONTENT AND INTERACTION
Keep it simple; make it better; and resist the temptations to do otherwise.
•It's about content. Having something to say or share with students that they will find worth reading, seeing and experiencing. There are lots of resources, so choosing the best wisely is key.
•In many ways you are a guide to the resources and a simplifier of how to get the right result the first time. How you organize the resources and provide students useful directions and information about using them are critical.
•It's also about interaction. In an online course there are three types of interaction you will be creating with the activities you plan:
1.interaction between the student and the content material;
2.interaction between the student and you; and
3.interaction among students in the class. In each case the interaction should be instrumental to success in the course or task. Become familiar with the array of web tools for interaction and select those that best fit what you are trying to accomplish. Talk with training coordinators and online faculty, surf other course sites, look at the courseware tutorials.
•Don't provide anything -- information, links, or functionality -- that you don't expect students to use.
•Keep in mind that you will get what you inspect not what you expect, so plan ways that students show you that they have used and learned what you have provided them. Be very specific in your assignments. Students may be confused by any ambiguity due to the lack of face-to-face contact.
•Use a consistent organizational pattern (module template).
•Make sure content is accurate, technically correct, readable and easy to follow. Navigation should work correctly and that the authority and currency of the page can be determined.
•Faculty members should be aware of the copyright issues, privacy of information, and net-etiquette with the Internet.
•Solicit feedback and suggestions on how to improve your site. Seek out the advice of your peers.
•Some of your students will be very "internet savvy" and can provide valuable information to improve your course design. Some of this course "tweaking" can be done during the semester or between semesters. Encourage your students to report dead links, inactive pages, or other malfunctions in your web course.
STEP 8: BACK IT UP AND KEEP THE BUGS OUT
What can go wrong generally does go wrong at the most inconvenient time.
•Faculty should keep a current back of their course gradebook. Desire2Learn offers the ability to download your gradebook in a comma delimited format (CSV).
•Faculty are responsible for monitoring virus protection software on their own computer. Often students do not realize that they have a virus on their computer and they will send faculty members one unknowingly.
© 2005 Tennessee Board Of Regents. All rights reserved
