CEP 820 Reflections on Building an Online Course by Matt Ball
Over the past couple months I have laid the foundation for an online course. I have created the framework and installed some content, but I have much left to do. There have been, however, a number of things I have learned along the way. Of all the things that I have learned, I have compiled my thoughts in two areas; Critical Design Decisions and Critical Pedagogical Decisions. I have gone back and forth over a number of these trying to find the best way to teach my students. In the end, what I have really learned is that teaching is learning, especially when embarking on the task of teaching students online. As technology evolves, online learning and teaching does as well. The module I have build over the past few months will completely outdated within a couple years and I will have to begin the task again of building an online course.
Critical Design Decisions
Content Layout - teaching students in a classroom and online are completely different. Online teaching requires the teacher to put in to print everything that is said, hand gestures, and emotions in to an online format. This is not easy to do. I spent several days trying to determine the most effective layout of content possible.
Age Appropriate - I wanted my course to be accessible and appropriate for a high school student that had no prior online learning experience. I needed create a learning environment that was easy to follow and created no confusion. Instead of titling lessons by a term or phrase, I titled them as Lesson 1, Lesson 2, etc.
Critical Pedagogical Decisions
Student Interaction - student interaction is always difficult in an online learning environment, but I wanted student to have some interaction with each other. In order to do this I used a class wiki for vocabulary and a number of discussion forums to stimulate interaction among students. In creating a course that aligns with Universal Design for Learning, I will modify my course guidelines to allow for students to submit podcasts and screencasts as responses instead of a typed response. This will allow students to put a face to a name.
Student Accessibility - in creating this online course, I tried to make this online course available to all students. I quickly realized, however, that I was missing a key ingredients to creating a course that aligned with the principles of UDL.
Theoretical Foundation of Online Design
Universal Design for Learning (UDL). All classes have students with disabilities of some sort. One underlying principle of my online course was accessibility. I used multiple modes of delivery for the information and also allowed student to express their knowledge in multiple formats.
Ease of Flow - When designing my online course, I wanted my lessons to flow with each other and build off of each other. Much like we do in the classroom when one lesson relates to the previous day’s lesson, I wanted the same consistency in my online course. I tried to make my online course easy to follow and in a logical manner that made sense to the students. I did not want to create a course that left students guessing how the information flowed together.
Pitfalls and Overcoming Them
Language Accessibility - one of the major obstacles I face is language barriers. I wanted to create a course that allowed for students of all language backgrounds to participate, but I found translation service were difficult to embed or link to. To remedy this problem, I provided students with links to online translation devices to assist in their online learning experience.
Choosing the Right CMS - the first challenge was choosing the right CMS for what I wanted. A number of school districts have already purchased a CMS, but my school has not. As a result, I chose a CMS that provided me with the learning options that I wanted and thought would promote student achievement. In doing so, I also focused on CMS’s that were free and did not require an on site server.
My Online Course To request permission to join and view my online course, please click the link above.
My Developer Notebook To view my full developer notebook for the creation of this online course, please click the link above.