Category: Course Design

Moving a Face-to-Face Course Online without Losing Student Engagement | Faculty Focus

The rapid growth and popularity of online learning is necessitating the creation of online courses that actively engage learners. Research has shown that effective integration of multimedia that is content relevant and pedagogically sound can be a valuable teaching tool for facilitating student learning Mandernach, 2009.

In the Master of Finance program at Penn State World Campus, one of the faculty who teaches a very successful, popular foundational course was tasked with authoring an online course. As instructional designers, we worked with the faculty and our design team, including our in-house multimedia staff, to replicate the course for an online adult student audience. The use of multimedia was a necessary component in re-creating the dynamic aspects of the course that made it such a successful face-to-face class.

via Moving a Face-to-Face Course Online without Losing Student Engagement | Faculty Focus.

Using the LMS as a Social Network in a Supersized Course | EDUCAUSE.edu

“Large class sizes make it infinitely more challenging for college instructors to connect and communicate with individual students. This might not be a big issue if professors have an army of teaching assistants running smaller tutorial groups, but that’s not always the case; in my courses, for example, hundreds of students meet in a single learning space for a weekly lecture or webinar. As in online classes of any size, having a massive group of students in a single location creates the real risk that students will feel anonymous and disengaged due to a lack of meaningful interaction with their professor and peers.”

“The key to effective socialized course design lies in understanding and configuring the LMS as not (just) a content delivery mechanism for distributing grades and PDFs but also as a potentially valuable niche online networking platform that can support a series of socialized assignments.”

via Using the LMS as a Social Network in a Supersized Course | EDUCAUSE.edu.

What Is Agile Learning Design?

Agile started as a software development process—a reaction to the cumbersome “waterfall” methodology that had been brought over from older manufacturing practices. Early software development companies had no model for their new trade, so they simply borrowed what had been established for years in other industries where products are made.

The problem is that this method is extremely impractical for software development. This is because in order to move to the next stage of development, the stage before it must be 100% complete, perfect, and documented… and that’s just not how software development works. (I’m sure you can already start to see how this applies to learning design).

What Is Agile Learning Design?.

Agile vs ADDIE: Which Is Better for Learning Design?

This difference (of early sharing and collaborating) is such a breath of fresh air that some people have even recommended leaving ADDIE in favor of a new, more agile system.

I can see where they are coming from, because newer and more efficient processes have been developed. Agile (and other iterative models like it) take into account new technologies and more rapidly evolving ideas. But I’m not sure if “leaving” is the language we should be using. The concept behind the ADDIE model has worked for instructional designers for years. There is something about the simplicity of it—it grounds the team in stages so you know you’re not designing before you’ve defined the problem, or developing before you’ve laid out your design, etc.

Agile vs ADDIE: Which Is Better for Learning Design?.