dual design

Giving a presentation last week - faculty asks, "Mike, when you say design, what do you mean?" Good question.

When discussing online course design, I'm tend to confuse instructional design with information design (and to complicate it even more -- information architecture). Lately, I've been trying to talk about design in two ways.

First, I address the basic concepts of instructional design. This is important because we want faculty thinking about their instructional strategies early on in the course design process. How are we going to instruct? What are the engagement opportunities? How are we going to assess?

Second, I address issues of organization and emphasize the concept of heuristic for the course space. How are we going to sequence the instructional blocks? What metaphor are we going to use to organize the content? What structures are imposed by the LMS?

I have to make an effort to keep these two aspects of course design separate and clear. I think faculty will be better able to work through our design/development model if we clearly differentiate between the types of design activities.

working class

Faculty can be funny. When working with them on online course projects, they like to dance around the workload issue. More precisely, they want to know how much time they'll have to put into teaching online without directly asking the question.

Yesterday one of our program directors called to ask about contact hours in an online class. Apparently a faculty member she's working with needed to know "how many contact hours will be required" before he would commit to designing, developing, and teaching an online course. I hadn't seen that fancy step before, but it shows how lithe faculty can be on their feet.

Rather provide a description of how contact hours work in an online courses, I sent up a general description of faculty workload for an online course, which I found in a new and incredibly useful book titled The Online Teaching Survival Guide by Judith Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad. The authors claim that because a 3 credit F2F course typically represents 20-25% a full- time faculty workload (assuming a 4-5 course load), faculty are working 8-10 hrs. per week on that course (representing 32-50 hours per week just on course-related activities). For an online course, after an initial investment of time (tools training, resource collection, course building, etc.) faculty should therefore be spending no more than 8-10 hrs. per week on course-related activities.

While I like the generalization about time commitments, I see some problems with using this model as a standard reply to the question about workload. My principle hesitancy is that the model assumes faculty put in 8-10 hrs. per week on each class they're teaching. This is more likely and average time commitment over the course of a semester, rather than an actual time-on-task commitment each week per each course taught. I see faculty recoiling from the idea that for their online course, they'll be actively working 8-10 per week for the duration of the course. My opinion here has little to do with faculty work ethics. I'm more worried about complicating the dance with the misconception by many faculty that online teaching is easier than F2F instruction. This isn't about the politics of dancing with faculty, it's about first getting them out on the floor. The invitation has to be appealing, nonthreatening, and genuine.

That's why we have our work cut out for us.

learner-centered

I was having a discussion the other day with some folks about best practices for teaching online. Someone in the group piped up and said, "Oh, that's just a learner-centered teaching strategy." I thought about that for a nanosecond and said, "Well, if our primary objective in the online course space is to allow students to shape the learning outcomes, then yes, I guess I'm describing a learner-centered pedagogy."

I could tell my response didn't sit well with the person who made the observation, and I think I know why. The "learner-centered" phenomenon has been around for a long time. In the late 1990s we were applying it to corporate initiatives where we moved from knowledge-centered training to a focus on learning/training outcomes. The idea was to expand the training (F2F, computer-based, web-based, etc.) to include "shop floor" activities that lead the learner to their own desirable learning outcome, such as being able to perform a new task or to perform an old task better. The key to this approach is to provide the learner with opportunities to demonstrate their success in achieving their learning outcomes and aligning those outcomes with the overall training requirements.

In an online undergrad college course, we are not so much applying a learner-centered strategy as we are a sort of knowledge/learner hybrid pedagogy. Encouraging students (through design and prompts) to interact with the course content and with each other is one thing (and one aspect of learner-centered instruction). However, I don't know of any faculty who would openly adopt their students' goals for their course. A more realistic outcome is to have faculty identify and address the disconnect that almost always exists between their goals and those of their students. It's similar to the challenge of aligning corporate training outcomes and requirements, just more tedious.

There's a lot of value in learner-centered pedagogy. We just have to be cautious and deliberate in applying that pedagogy to online learning environments.