Designing Online Courses with Students in Mind
The shift to online education has forced us to evaluate how to best design online courses while keeping student interaction in mind. This video discusses some tips on how to design courses for effective engagement and increased retention. I discuss assessment strategy, and course delivery. I also discuss the difference between asynchronous and self-paced courses, a mistake many educators make.
Transcript
One of the biggest issues that I have seen with the shift to online courses, is that educators are taking what they did in-person and replicating it in online education. For online education to work, we have to carefully consider the user experience and design online courses with that in mind.
This is the second episode in this series on online teaching. Today, we will talk about how I designed my courses for online education. There is no one way of doing this, and there are tradeoffs to every approach. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic too, so if something sparks a thought, drop it in the comments and I will try to respond to as many of them as I can.
Grab a cup of coffee and let’s talk about designing online courses and building community. I will share some areas that every educator should consider when designing an online course. I will also discuss the difference between self-paced and asynchronous courses.
My first tip to designing online courses is to design them as a collection of mini sprints. Fatigue kicks in faster when you are learning alone. In economics we call this diminishing marginal product. It applies to everything in life! Diminishing marginal product, can be described as, the additional return you receive from additional resources that you allocate to an activity. In the context of learning, the first hour of studying has higher returns than the fifth hour of studying. That means we need to create an environment where students restart that learning process or to allow them to take more breaks in between. In online learning, diminishing marginal product kicks in quicker so educators need to design courses with that in mind.
For my principles of macroeconomics course, which is an introductory course and usually has first- or second-year college students enrolled in it, I moved my course from being designed around a chapter format to thinking of my course as a collection of 16 week mini sprints. Rather than thinking about what I want my students to learn from chapter on GDP which spans two weeks, I changed the way I viewed it to, what do I want my students to learn during the first week of class. So, I shifted my course design from having 8 chapters, to having 16 weeks of content. Each week had its own learning objectives, and assignments.
This shift in design impacts assessment and the weekly experience. To create the mini- sprint feel and to schedule breaks for your students, you want to be conscious about how you are assessing them. I opted for high frequency and low stake assessment. This also helped create a consistent weekly schedule. Each week, my students had 10 problems to complete. No matter how much content I covered, or how much I loved a collection of questions, which every professor has their favorite questions, I made sure to stick to 10. It was tempting to add one or two questions some weeks, but I thought it would be more important to remain consistent than it is to add assessment. I chose 10 questions you might want 20 questions whatever that number is try to remain consistent throughout. Students also had to complete a weekly discussion board. The discussion boards were designed for them to connect the content to their personal experience. Macroeconomics is best learned when students connect it to the world they see around them.
Consistency is important here and students made me aware of how much they appreciate it. I'll get to that in a second. First, there is another area that I remained consistent with; I released my course content in a weekly format. I wanted everyone to be on the same part of the course. With online education and talking to students, I have learned that some of them like to binge learn. They will try to go through a course as fast as possible. They think of it as a checklist of tasks rather than allowing themselves to learn and reflect. So, every Sunday at 8am, I released my weekly content for the week. I also send a Sunday morning message recapping what we covered the week before and what the current week will entail. It also allowed me to make modifications to the course or share current news articles as world news happened.
Something I forgot to mention, since I had high frequency low stake assignments, I also allowed for 2 missed weeks of assignments. That meant out of 15 homework and discussion board posts, I would count the top 13 assignments. That flexibility was important because of my concern about any of my students getting sick during the pandemic.
Students appreciated the consistency. They could plan around the course requirements. I also had only a few missed assignments. One of my students expressed their appreciation by sending me an email saying “thank you for posting the materials at the set time of 8 AM every Sunday. It is wonderful to have a professor we can depend on!”
If you are going to have surprises, make them positive surprises.
While my goal was to be consistent. Going through the semester I realized that students' morale was taking a hit as we progressed. Whether it was online education or the state of the world, I don’t think I'll ever know. But I felt that my students needed a break. I used my discussion board as a break from time to time. On election week I gave them all full points and told them to take the time off. Other weeks I would ask them to reflect on their learning, their growth. I used discussion boards so I could engage them and encourage them to develop a growth mindset. As I said I teach mostly first and second year students, this is an area where I would have had discussions about the growth mindset and professional development in class. My online course was missing this interaction, the discussion board allowed me to bring it to life, and create community, to allow students to have a break. In online education, I think it is important for educators to gauge student’s wellbeing and their learning mindset.
I think there is a misconception about asynchronous courses vs self-paced courses.
I hear a lot of students complain about self paced courses that are marketed as asynchronous, so let’s talk about this. A self paced course is where the content is posted, and the student is expected to go through the course at their own pace. The instructor is available only in the format to answer student emails. I consider that format, a self-paced course. Asynchronous courses are those without a designated meeting time, however the educator is heavily involved in communicating and leading the learning experience remotely. This can be done through the weekly emails, designated live times to meet, or virtual office hours.
This episode has gone on longer than I expected. Let me cut it off here and next week I will discuss developing learning content and creating productive zoom meetings, that is the connection part of the video series.
I look forward to reading your comments. See you next Friday on Coffee With Dr. A
