RSA 5 Designing An Online Course: The Big Picture
http://ctl.mesacc.edu/resources/designing-an-online-course/
Wendy Bedell
May 1, 2011
Chapter Seven in Building Online Learning Communities (2007) had many good ideas for designing an on-line course. Palloff and Pratt state that it is important to not transfer a face-to-face course to an online version without modification. They use the term “curriculum conversion” for this form of course design (p. 129). There are many things to think about. They suggest a good place to start is “with the end in mind” (p. 130). While the instructor should leave some choice in the syllabus, he/she needs to be cognizant of the student and what “skills and abilities should they be able to take with them at the end of the course” (p. 130). The book mentions some obvious considerations such as outcomes and objectives, appropriate assignments and readings, course activities, and guidelines for minimum requirements as well as netiquette that must also be considered in course design.
In the information found in Designing An Online Course: The Big Picture does a good job making the jump to teaching on-line sound exciting. The article gives some good tips for organizing thoughts and materials for teaching on-line. It also provides many additional resources for the reader’s use (there is some really good information on this site). I really liked the end of the article. It states “Give yourself permission to be a student too – to learn over time.” It also mentions that online teaching is “evolving” just as regular face-to-face teaching is still doing.
These two reading are very different in their formality. Palloff and Pratt are very thorough in their information regarding starting an online course. They give an abundance of information to think about, and very clear guidelines to help the reader set up their course. I especially found the “Guiding questions to assist in building an effective course syllabus” section helpful in this area (p. 153). The website that I read Designing An Online Course: The Big Picture is much less formal. It basically gave some very loose guidelines but still gave the reader some guidance. What I really liked about this website was all the additional information that you could get to with a few extra clicks of the mouse.
References
Palloff, Rena M. and Pratt, Keith (2007). Building Online Learning Communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
The Center for Teaching and Learning. Retrieved from http://ctl.mesacc.edu/resources/designing-an-online-course/
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