From design to delivery: A quick guide to co-developing an open-access course
An academic perspective
Here in the i3HS Hub, we develop short open-access courses for the general public who have an interest in health-related topics. We are always looking for new opportunities to work with subject experts to develop these courses. Although there is a desire from academics to engage in developing these courses, conflicting priorities means that open-access often gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.
Therefore, I thought it would be useful to create a post to help demystify the process and make it more transparent so that anyone interested in developing an open-access course can better understand the requirements involved. I have roped in Paula Whittaker and Clare Huish to help put this post together. Paula and Clare have recently launched the ‘What is Health?’ open-access course and this post captures their experience.
The post is split by the 5 stages of building an online course (Define — Design — Develop — Deploy — Deliver) and gives an estimation of the time and work involved for an academic by stage. This will differ from person to person but it is a good guideline.
Define
All you need at the beginning of the process is an idea.
Paula: From a chat with Clare about our different backgrounds into public health, I had a vague notion that a course looking at ‘What is health?’ would be interesting, but without my previous experience of creating an OA course it probably would have stayed as just an idea, as I would have assumed it would take too long and be beyond my very limited tech skills.
Clare: You don’t need anything well-formed or solid to get started. I would add that finding a colleague to collaborate with can also help you get started. Don’t ‘overthink it,’ share your ideas and enjoy seeing the course come to life.
The ‘What is Health?’ topic was perfect for an open-access course because it stands alone but also links into lots of MPH Public Health course units so is a great signposter to the breadth of the MPH course.
Design
The design process started with Paula and Clare putting ideas on a page:
Paula: We started with a basic Word document that we used to dump ideas on. From that we worked out what we could cover in a roughly 3-hour course. We didn’t spend a lot of time planning — we dived in with ideas for content, then went back to ILOs (Intended Learning Outcomes), then edited our ideas for content.
They then met (Meeting 1) to talk through their ideas and agree on actions with deadlines. After this, they spent some time editing and refining their idea on a shared Word document. After their second meeting (Meeting 2) they had a rough plan of what they wanted the course to include ready for their first meeting with me.
Paula: Two of us working together was a big help at this stage as it meant we held each other to account for meeting the deadlines we had set. It might be more difficult to motivate yourself if working alone. If you are, talk to Cath early and set a date to present her with your course outline.
It took Paula and Clare around 2–3 days each of working on the design of the course to get to the point where they were ready to meet with me. Paula and Clare were both using content they were already familiar with so there was no need for lots of research. At this stage, Paula and Clare were already thinking about reusability and how the content for the open-access course could be used in credit-bearing units and how they could use elements from other course units to design into the open-access course.
Once the design stage had been completed, Clare, Paula and I met (Meeting 3) to go through the document. As we were in lockdown at this point, we met online via Zoom. I shared my screen and we talked through the Word document and we discussed each element of the design. I added Track Changes to the Word document about how they pictured the course on Rise (the platform we used to build the course).
This meeting is extremely useful to share ideas and suggest different ways to present content and build different learning activities. Paula and Clare had some great pedagogical ideas that I was able to translate into online content.
Academic tasks with a time estimate
- Working on own ideas in a shared document (2–3 days — this will vary depending on familiarity with the topic)
- Meeting 1 — talk through ideas and agree on actions (1 hour)
- Edit and refine ideas (2–3 hours)
- Meeting 2 — agree on course outline (1 hour)
- Meeting 3 — meet with Learning Technologist to translate ideas into an online course (1 hour)
- TOTAL: 3–4 days
Development
After meeting with Paula and Clare to talk through the Word document, I was able to start building the course in Rise. Rise is a web-based content authoring tool that allows for rapid development and feedback. I used the Word document as a blueprint to create the course structure, typeset the text, source images, embed videos and create knowledge checks.
This took me approximately 1 day to build in Rise (7 hours to build approximately 3 hours of content) and did not include the development time to edit a video (done separately).
Once I had created the course, I sent a Review 360 link to Paula and Clare to add comments to the course. Review 360 is an excellent feature in Rise that allows collaborators to comment directly on the course (a bit like Track Changes in Word). I was then able to address their comments before sending the course out for wider user feedback.
After addressing as much of the user feedback as I could (formatting issues, grammar etc.), Paula, Clare and I met again online to address the outstanding comments (Meeting 4). Once this has been completed, no further involvement is required from an academic perspective.
Academic tasks with a time estimate
- Review course (2–3 hours)
- Meeting 4 — Meeting with Learning Technologist check reviewer feedback (1 hour)
- Address user comments (1 hour)
- TOTAL: 0.5 days
Deploy and Deliver
To make the course available to the general public, I deployed it through Canvas and Canvas catalogue.
The course is fully open, self-paced and can be taken by a learner anytime. The course is standalone so there is no academic involvement in the delivery of the course. Deploying the course through Canvas and Canvas catalogue also means that we are able to monitor engagement through the stats and analytics. There is also a mechanism in the course for learners to provide feedback so that the course can make continual improvements.
Conclusion
This process worked extremely well with plenty of opportunities for review and feedback. The academics summarised their experience as follows:
Paula: I thoroughly enjoyed the process from start to end. Collaborating with Clare and Cath was great because they both added things that I would never have thought of. It was great to see vague ideas turn into a course. The only difficult part was being brave enough to take the first step and putting the first idea on a page- once that was done the rest flowed quite easily.
Clare: OA is more relevant than ever and it is exciting and rewarding to create content that is free and openly accessible to a global audience. Working with Paula and Cath who are ‘do-ers’ drove this process along really well and am also thankful to Disability Access Lead, Mark Todd for his input and expertise and our small team of excellent reviewers whose feedback improved the course still further.
Recommendations
Here are some recommendations for anyone considering creating an OA course:
- There is no fixed method for going through the process, start with whatever ideas you have first and build from there.
- Having a partner works really well so maybe think about who you might work well with and ask them to co-write a course with you.
- If you go it alone, arrange a meeting with me to talk about your idea and discuss the process
- OA is about knowledge sharing. Enjoy sharing your knowledge!
If you are interested in developing a short open-access course, please contact i3hs@manchester.ac.uk.
