Building a Showcase Course Redux OnlineCollegeProgram.Org

Building a Showcase Course Redux

Written by Jade Nowland on January 24, 2012.

Some half-dozen years ago, I took part in building a “demo” course to showcase a learning / course management system (L/CMS) that was merely to be an exploratory space. This was mostly to show the various and full functions of the system for delivering various digital contents, supporting intercommunications, building learning communities, and maintaining student records. This demo course involved curriculum from K-12 and university because this was designed for a wide level of public usage.

Showcasing Quality E-Learning to a University Faculty Audience

Of late, another project involves creating an online showcase course, this time, for university faculty to see how others are building learning in the same L/CMS. This latter project assumes some varying levels of sophistication—from very low levels of sophistication to more complex ones. The overall structure of this course was based on an e-learning quality rubric. This course is being built to support training for faculty teaching online—to encourage more quality e-learning.

Beyond the audience differences and purpose, this latter project has been somewhat different from the initial one. First, there is a focus on what is buildable on the campus in terms of offices that can provide videography and the building of interactive digital objects. Another focus is on piecemeal differences that may benefit any range of courses. For example, there are examples of instructor telepresences. There are examples of study guides used to support student learning. There are creative prompts to encourage student interactivity in message boards. For example, there may be the showcasing of various types of assessment techniques—from automated self-assessments to electronic portfolios. There are examples of ways that students may present their work online using web conferencing tools.

Another challenge is that we now not only had to get releases from the various faculty members, but we had to get copyright releases from all the students whose works were displayed. In other cases, we had to redact names in order to protect learner privacy…particularly if we just took a screenshot of an interactive space.

This also meant the need to call in lots of favors from various faculty (from various departments) with whom one has worked over the years. This was an exercise in good will for most, but in one case, one faculty who had gotten lots and lots of free work and who was retiring chose not to share anything. For him, this was more generosity than he felt comfortable with, and one has to respect that as well.

Annotating for E-Learning Relevance

The learning contents alone would not necessarily be obviously relevant without appropriate annotations, so the contents were annotated in depth. People were given credit for what they contributed. They were given the access rights to the course shell to sometimes design and upload their own contents. The point was to have absolute transparency in terms of design and also to have a spirit of sharing and generosity.

Modeling Online Learning Standards

The course itself had to be designed to model standards—the standards of intellectual property protections, accessibility guidelines, privacy rights, and others. This course itself had a copyright guideline. Files were versioned into different formats for accessibility. Images were alt-texted, and videos and audio files were transcribed.

Further, there was a special folder on the uses of open-source resources, to encourage users to access open-source photos, diagrams, videos, audio files, digital learning objects, and electronic simulations to augment their own courses (particularly given the wide access for open-source contents and open courseware).

Useful Resources

Finally, there were plenty of templates and other files for faculty download. These resources were marked open-source. There was a folder of resources created by the local librarians.

So much of the work of instructional design is to encourage faculty to push their imagination and to take the risks of trying new types of teaching and learning. Having an automated course broadens the sense of what may / may not be done in a low-pressure environment where faculty may explore at their own convenience.

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