Quality Matters provides us with guidelines for planning online courses. This is our starting point and will be a foundation for your development of an online course.
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Unit Overview and Objectives
The first step in developing an online course is Course Design. This involves the research and detailed planning for a course that is required before you begin to actually build the course in Blackboard. Careful attention to the steps in the planning process will pay off when you begin to actually build your course.
After completing this module, you should be able to:
- Discuss how the Quality Matters standards can be used to assist in your course design.
- Develop measurable course level objectives.
- Choose assessments to measure achievement of the objectives.
Here is a link to the PPT from this week. It is in PDF format, 3 slides per page and includes the topics we will discuss on Sept. 11 as well.
Planning Your Online Course 2013.pdf
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Introduction to Quality Matters
This presentation provides an introduction to the QM rubric and process. It will provide a nice review and expands on some of the content I covered in class Wednesday.
Introduction to Quality Matters (narrated PPT – about 15 minutes long)
Handout (slides in handout format, 3 to a page).
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Getting Started with Your Course Design
You may be getting the idea that designing an online course is DIFFERENT than designing a face-to-face course. In some ways it is different, in others it is very much the same.
What is DIFFERENT…….. the new technology and new tools that you have available.
What is the SAME…… the fact that course should be based on learning objectives and figuring out the best way to achieve those objectives.
We will use the Quality Matters standards as a guideline for designing an online course. You might notice that the first standard in QM is the Overview and Introduction, however this is NOT where we will start our design.
The Overview and Introduction should be written AFTER you have designed your course, since you will need to have the course all planned in order to write the most effective Overview.
The design of any course should start with the Course Objectives.
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Writing Excellent Objectives
All course design starts with writing learning objectives (sometimes called “outcomes”). These objectives should describe what students should be able to DO after completing the course. Once you have identified what you want the students to be able to do – then the course materials, resources, and activities should all help students meet those objectives. And, your assessments should measure whether the objectives were met.
The following document has been extracted from a longer presentation from the Ohio University faculty support site. It provides an excellent review of the purpose of objectives.
The last slide in the presentation that refers to the different domains is a lead in to Bloom’s Taxonomy. Although the most used aspect of Bloom’s is the Cognitive Domain, Bloom actually proposed that there are 3 domains of learning. The following interactive tutorial presents information on the Cognitive domain only. Click on each part of the triangle to view information about it. Notice in the text box, there is a vertical scroll bar to scroll down and read the whole entry about a particular level.
Bloom’s Taxonomy Interactive site
Here’s a handy list of action verbs: Blooms verbs
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Where are we headed?
The course objectives are just the first step. One of the key elements of online course design is a concept called Alignment.
In Quality Matters this is implemented by making sure that all the major components of a course align.
This document provides a brief overview of the concept of alignment…
University of Northern Colorado 