I want my online course materials to address a set of design principles that might be grouped under the umbrella of expanding access—expanding the range of influences on the students’ learning and expanding access to the learning materials from courses. Most of these principles are difficult or impossible to pursue on existing Learning Management Systems (LMSs).
I have to organize my course materials in ways that may be unfamiliar to students. I continue to work on three fronts: guide and coach students into getting used to my approaches; make periodic changes (such as when a certain platform is discontinued) and elaborations (example); and articulate the design principles—this last being the topic of this post. (Comments welcome towards revision of the post and of the principles themselves.)
Design Principles
1) employ free technology that students can adopt and adapt to use outside their studies, especially graduate students who will lead their own classes and training using online tools.
[Obviously proprietary LMSs don’t meet #1.]
2) arrange technology and pedagogy to bring students from a distance into regular classroom sessions and make this mode of course delivery work equally well for face-to-face as well as students from a distance.
E.g., a) the five phase dialogue process (http://bit.ly/FivePhase) gives equal voice to online and in-classroom students.
b) use of a wordpress site (or, in earlier years, a wiki) for sharing and commenting on drafts helps build a sense that learning happens in a community, not only as dictated and assessed by the instructor. [I do not, however, expect out-of-class asynchronous online discussions.]
c) use zoom rather than the video-conference tools in Blackboard because zoom is freer of visual distraction. [Recording the sessions also makes it possible for students who miss classes or parts of them to catch up and complete make-up assignments.]
d) more generally, maximize the focus on what needs to be read and minimize distractions that perpetuate the online mentality that we could be somewhere else (checking email, texts, news feeds,…) (see #10 and Appendix below).
3) foster the idea that students are contributing to the building of knowledge and resources (in contrast to making submissions that fulfill course requirements and disappear at the end of the semester).
Originally this happened though printed compilations, then pdfs linked to webpages or wikispaces wiki, and, with the demise of wikispaces, on wordpress sites (e.g., http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/692Examples.html).
4) A variant of #3 is that, during the semester, student submissions and instructor comments get assembled in one place, like a portfolio. [This also means that students can keep track for themselves of their progress and not use valuable time during class or office hours asking me to tell them how they are doing.]
5) resist the “cut-to-the-chase” mode of students that the typical LMS facilitates, that is, students homing in at the last minute on what they need to do before class. Instead, in various ways, remind students that the class session is a phase in an unfolding learning process over the semester to which the components of the session in question contribute.
6) More generally, avoid any online instructional mode that is like programmed learning, i.e., read this and do an exercise to show you have learned it, then read that, then that. When online instruction imitates programmed learning, the instructor, having put a lot of time into preparing, say, a powerpoint presentation, can think that it’s now the students’ responsibility to take in the information. [There is a long history of critiques of programmed learning, such as this 2003 thesis.]
6a) A flip side of this is that having everything explained in the course materials isn’t the only or best response to students losing track. Allow time in class, buddy-pairs, and office-hours to remind students of what preparation and submissions are ahead and, from time to time, highlight under-appreciated instructions for use of the wordpress site.
7) course materials are mirrored in a master syllabus that can be printed as a whole and read offline and in which any session can be seen in context, that is, as it contributes to the unfolding of the course.
The typical organization of the syllabus (e.g., www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/645/syllabus.html) has 5 sections: I. Quick access to key information and links to bookmark on your browser; II. Information to get started, orient yourself at the start of the course, and refer back to from time to time; III. Contract: Course requirements and assessment; IV. Schedule of classes: What is expected each session and why — how each session contributes to the unfolding of the course. (This section starts with links to specific sessions); V. Bibliography (with links to pdfs of readings)
8) open-access documentation of syllabi, course evaluations, and course development so that prospective students and faculty colleagues can learn about and from the teaching approaches used.
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/pjt/portfolioCourses-TOC.html
9) document tools and processes online, which facilitated the publication in 2012 and updated in 2019 of Taking Yourself Seriously: A Fieldbook of Processes of Research and Engagement (with J. Szteiter) (http://bit.ly/TYS2019).
10) seek a consistent appearance that minimizes distractions from the text that students have to read and that minimizes tables and frames so as to meet requirements for visually impaired. [In this spirit, menus are always on the right hand side or in a single strip under the header. Webpages are not flashy; see also #1, 5, 11]
11) do all of the above in a way that is sustainable given the competing demands on—or desires of—the instructor. A contrast to this is making flashy changes to websites when resources are not available to keep the site updated. [In the spirit of sustainability, I use: simple html coding; relative URLs so pages can be transferred to new server when this is required; and avoid LMSs, which get superceded every few years. (The demise of wikispaces, which almost all courses in my program were making use of, undermines my argument on this last point.) I also keep a second copy of the master syllabus that I edit or annotate with changes that are suggested by the experience during the semester. This becomes an invaluable aide memoire when I get ready for the next offering of a course.]
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Appendix: Other design principles that inform my instruction:
• Online Mindfulness (Envisage any online forum as a space that you enter and leave mindfully)
• Slow EdTech, including “guidelines about specific situations and specific ways in which specific educational technologies are of significant pedagogical benefit.”
• Connecting-Puzzling-Reflecting Spaces
Puzzle—Create Change—Reflect 