Designing for Online Programs: Collaboration and Consistency
Abstract: Designing a quality online course takes a fair amount of time, effort, and resources. Designing your course as part of an online program or degree increases the level of planning and coordination. Recently, the University of Utah has taken the plunge to develop online degree programs in areas such as Engineering, Nursing, Social Work, Psychology, and Economics with a team of five instructional designers. Our instructional design team has learned many lessons after working with dozens of instructors and developing over fifty courses. This presentation will highlight and demonstrate three areas instructors have indicated as being beneficial to course design across a department. They are 1) using the backwards design model for aligning department courses and content, 2) identifying university support services (e.g., librarians, advisors, or writing center) and embedding them into the course; and 3) having a consistency in course design using templates and common technologies.
Presider: Nathan Love, Western Kentucky University