Best Practices for Developing Online Courses

I’ve been working in online education for more than a decade. And yet, I still hear a common refrain. “Face to face is the best way to learn,” professors and administrators tell me. “You just can’t replicate that online.” And in some ways, they are right. You can’t replicate the face to face education experience online. But the question is: Do you want to? Or can you improve on the experience and develop something that works within the online framework to improve student outcomes and ensure that learning is tailored to the student?

The Importance of Instructional Design

It has been said that more than 50 percent of communication is nonverbal. Instructors rely on that in the classroom, adjusting their lessons and communication based on verbal and nonverbal cues from their students (I am sure my yawning in early morning classes helped give some cues about how engaging I found the lecture!). Many professors, when taking their classes online, worry about losing that immediate feedback. Instructional design can help assuage this worry.

A critical part of instructional design is Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which addresses the need to design for multiple types of populations. By planning for ways to meet multiple types of learners in every aspect of a course, instructors don’t have to adjust on the fly. Students like me won’t be yawning because professors will have planned for those who have a hard time processing information only when they hear it; instead, exercises will have been developed for people who learn better by doing, or videos for people who need to visually see information to retain it.

By incorporating best practices in instructional design, professors can answer the following questions:

• How am I getting information to people?
• How can I establish multiple ways of engaging students?
• How do I ensure students know what they are supposed to be learning?
• How do I build a structure that lets me intervene as needed?

The Four Steps of Instructional Design

Although building high-quality courses is not easy, there are some steps to follow to ensure the best experience possible is provided.

Start backwards. Consider the end goal, first. What should students to be able to do at the end? What are the learning objectives? Use Bloom’s taxonomy to help outline these objectives.

Build assessments. Once what students should learn has been determined, consider how they are going to prove this learning. There are two types of assessments that should be incorporated: formative assessments and summative assessments.

Formative assessments are used throughout the course to assess smaller level objectives. These can take the forms of discussion board participation, weekly quizzes, papers or other kinds of assignments. They should evaluate specific concepts that have been taught recently.

Summative assessments allow students to synthesize everything they have learned throughout the course. These assessments should demonstrate that the core concepts have been learned so well that students are able to then take that knowledge and apply it in an advanced way, not by simply regurgitating information. These kind of assessments can take the form of term papers, presentations, capstone projects, or other long-form projects.

Following the principles of UDL, it’s important to provide options for students to account for different learning styles. This is especially true for summative assessments; giving an option of a presentation or a term paper, for example, will help students demonstrate their knowledge in a way that plays to their strengths.

Sequence Knowledge. Once the learning objectives and assessments have been identified, professors can then determine how this information should be sequenced, or chunked. For example, in an accounting class, students need to know what debits and credits are before they can begin performing some of the more advanced functions.

Select Resources. One of the most amazing things to me is how much information is available. When I help my son with his homework, he is able to access things on the Internet that would have taken me days or weeks to find in the library. This gives professors almost unlimited resources to work with.

Once again, the principles of UDL remind us that it’s important to find not only the resources that work for the curriculum, but also to provide a variety of options. If the learning objectives are clear, finding resources should not be difficult. For example, in a class about World War II history, resource options could include reading Churchill’s speeches, watching a documentary or interviewing a veteran. These options, like offering assessment options, will help engage students at multiple points and in multiple ways.

Open educational resources, as we discussed before, are a huge help in this endeavor.

Assess the Data. Through the assessments, instructors are able to evaluate who is succeeding and who is struggling. This information can help instructors adjust within the course, and then make global changes the next time the course is taught. Data-driven decision making, and better tracking of outcomes, are keys to successful online instruction.

Making the Transition

One of the most difficult things for professors moving from on-ground to online teaching is moving away from the “sage on the stage” mindset. I well remember my college courses. Although I had many excellent professors, I also had plenty who stood in front of the classroom and lectured at us, rather than engaging us in thoughtful discussion. While the professor got through the curriculum, I have to confess, I didn’t retain much from those lectures.

Online teaching doesn’t allow for the “sage on the stage” but then, neither should on-ground teaching. As we have seen, a lot of the principles for high-quality instructional design are the same across modalities. The focus should be less on lecturing and more on engaging, less on imparting wisdom and more on starting a dialogue that will help students along their educational journey.

What do you think? Can online teaching improve upon the on-ground experience?