Writing and reviewing courses

Ross Woods, 2013

 

Lifecycle of a course

Writing a new course is quite labour-intensive and time consuming. This includes planning, assembling a team, setting parameters for the project, writingteh material, and running a pilot project (or Beta-test) with a small number of students. Although it needs to be finanicially viable, the group also needs to be a small enough for you to easily resolve any problems.

The first time it is run with a large group, it is expected to have some faults that need correction.

The following reviews are simply continual improvement, so course preparation costs decrease dramatically each time it is run.

A course will eventually become out-dated and staff must decide to re-write it. Even if the content is not out of date, any video and graphic content might need updating.

Perhaps we could delay complete re-writes by having a "Current research" box that is easy to update each time the course is run. These boxes could summarize current trends relevant to that subject.

 

About templates

  1. To start, we need a couple of good working examples of online programmed instruction.
  2. We could use templates to generate more templates. For some things, you could have a master template with lots of things in it, and simply delete various items to generate new templates. For example, a project management template is useful to generate courses in other fields that follow a project approach, such as community development and event management. The research template has a variation for undergraduate essays.
  3. We could have a simple wizard for staff to write tailor-made templates, but some would need a programmer to write them from scratch.
  4. Forking would allow us some extra options:

 

About themes

Online courses need to be consistently themed, especially when they comprise a range of disparate resources. The style sheets and general layout policies are the obvious starting points.

If using lots of video, it could follow some principles of a TV news presentation:

  1. The anchor is the personal face of the whole program, so that people associate it with a real person whom they can like.
  2. The anchor ties all the individual news items together, even though they don't actually present much of the news. Most reporting is done by correspondents and field reporters.
  3. The studio is the same every time to reinforce the brand and present a familiar environment to viewers.

It would be ideal if each student could see his/her tutor as the presenter, but it wouldn't be viable to produce full videos of every tutor. Any one course could have a whole team of tutors.

 

Planning

  1. Choose a particular course to develop. The choice should be a good fit with our strategic goals. It should be one for whom we have networks and immediate needs, and from whom we can gather good quality feedback very easily. It could be one of a number of things:
    1. Introductory English as a Second Language (ESL).
    2. A basic high school or university entrance level course.
    3. University students who want extra help or who are cramming for exams.
    4. A basic business course for highly motivated "need to learn it now" Australians, or.
    5. A basic business course for highly motivated "need to learn it now" non-Australian English native speakers.
  2. Identify student needs by consultation through our existing networks.

 

Assembling a team

Course development is a complex process. Depending on the range of options, it can involve the following roles:

  1. Project managers manage the whole course development process. This includes writing the course proposal and getting it approved, overseeing the team, complying with timefame, complying with budget, etc.)
  2. Two subject matter experts per study area write materials, answer content queries, and check accuracy.
  3. Tutors give feedback on how students have responded to different kinds of approaches.
  4. Course researchers find existing web resources, gather, analyze, and present new information. (Finding good materials on the web is a bigger job than it appears.)
  5. Instructional designer plans and writes lessons.
  6. Text editors proofread and check content, accuracy, presentation, etc. of text materials for publishing.
  7. Video production for interactive TV:
  8. Graphic designers make sure web appearance is attractive and functional.
  9. Test supervisors oversee field-testing of new materials with real students. (Often the same person as the instructional designer)
  10. Programmers for software development

 

Some fundamental tensions

Every specialist will probably be annoyed by managerialist values, such as budgetary impositions, the limitations of the target populations, etc.

It's quite likely that staff who are communication specialists will hit a wall in advanced units that need advanced technical knowledge to understand what they are even about. If the communications specialists get out of their depth and are less able to make a contribution, the educational quality of the materials would lower. If we face these situations, we'll require a specific coping strategy and extra training.

There is also a fundamental tension between the mindsets of teachers and subject matter experts:

Teachers

Subject matter experts

•   Express concepts in simple form for people who are unfamiliar with them
•   Prefer tertiary (explanatory) sources
•   Take responsibility for the learning process
•   See teaching as a priority

•   Express concepts in complex form as if people were familiar with them
•   Prefer primary sources
•   Expect students to take responsibility for their own learning
•   See preparation for research as a priority

 

An online option for writing units

A team of tutors could do most of the planning for a unit in a series of on-line Wikis. It would need to be supplemented by a videoconference, and it would be good to have a drag and drop facility in the software, so people could easily move items around on screen. The project leader also needs to keep backup versions on the way, to prevent good ideas from being lost. The team leader is responsible to assign tasks, although this is not usually difficult. After the team has worked on each stage, the team leader decides when the draft is ready to move on to the next stage.

The first pilot would mainly use behavioral learning principles and would not address a full range of learning styles.

  1. Train personnel to write self-teaching materials.
  2. Start with a simple brief for the team. The brief should contain:
    1. The topic, code and level (e.g. Accounting 101, freshman semester 2)
    2. Define the overarching purpose of the unit and philosophy of approach (e.g. the particular need it addresses)
    3. Appoint a team leader to oversee the project
    4. Define relationships with other units in the degree, e.g. shared metaphors, prerequistes, units for which it needs to prepare students
    5. Set a timeline with deadlines
    6. Convey results of any industry consultation and list any relevant industry standards
    7. Suggest templates
    8. Copyright arrangements.
  3. Team defines unit objectives.
  4. Team fills out the topic with sub-topics.
  5. Team defines lesson objectives.
  6. Team pools their knowledge of proven strategies and activities for teaching this subject matter.
  7. Team brainstorms suggestions for:
    1. Problematization and motivators
    2. Outline of each lesson
    3. Various possible sequences
    4. Learning activities
    5. Assessment activities
    6. Source materials
    7. Forks:
      • Forks for cultural styles, learning styles, temperaments, different levels of technology
      • Remedial loops (which are a kind of fork)
      • Short-cuts (another kind of fork).
  8. Team evaluates the ideas and selects the best.
  9. The team leader stores unused ideas in the vault (a repository of ideas).
  10. The team leader delegates any tasks that require specific expertise.
  11. Team drafts text of all written materials and script for video.
  12. Team tests the draft with a group of students from the target population. First, they need to validate the materials educationally and identify improvements. Second, it also needs to be effective as market research to find out what people want.
    1. Will it attract students? Would they recommend the course to others?
    2. Does it motivate them or bore them?
    3. Do students like it? Does it motivate them or bore them?
    4. What did students understand correctly? Incorrectly? Why?
    5. Which of our assumptions and hypoheses are correct? Which are incorrect? What changes do we need to make?
  13. The team intersperses questions to stimulate comment:
  14. The team leader sends the video script draft to the production team.
  15. The production team turns them into self-teaching materials.
  16. Upload the pilot program as a Moodle website.
  17. Moodle allows tutors to prepare week by week, so the final feild-tests only need to keep ahead of delivery.

 

Field-test

  1. First field-test. We should only recruit total newbies for all field-tests. The goal is to enable any intelligent person with an aptitude for study to learn effectively this way. It is also market research (as above).
    1. Recruit Australians students to test the first draft.
    2. Test the first draft with Australians doing it for no fee.
    3. Process whatever learning we can from the pilot.
    4. Make revisions, and retest until it is ready for a bigger test group.
  2. Do larger scale field tests with non-Australians with a special fee deal for a limited number of students. It should have value as a promotional exercise. We could use ACAS accreditation if we can assure authenticity of assessed evidence and follow ACAS quality protocols. Otherwise, we could only be able to charge for the use of an educational website. It would minimize the risk of getting a bad name among major mass markets during testing.
  3. In later tests, we'd need to recuit higher numbers of subjects from the actual target population. It would have a special fee deal, and needs to have value as a promotional exercise. It would be good to start getting a good reputation, with reduced risk of errors.

 

Deployment

  1. Get it up and running and turning an income. Group needs be big enough to be a real test and make money, but small enough to still be a test.
  2. Roll out a VLOI program charging market-level fees.
  3. Run pilot projects in other chosen disclines.
    1. The pilots need sufficient breadth of offerings to actually test the range of methods, and would need a fairly good feedback mechanism.
    2. Process whatever learning we can from our experiences and consolidate it.
    3. Evaluate courses based on comparability with major accredited traditional universities.
  4. Recruit students.
    1. Advertise for expressions of interest to enroll as students within our existing networks. This and Facebook will be the best places to start, whatever else we do. We should ask for enough personal details and information to determine eligibility.
    2. Later on, recruit more widely in our target populations. We might have to pay recruiting fees. Prospective students would register interest on a website.
    3. Could George start an India office to advertise for expressions of interest? Source computer programmers?.
    4. Could the China office advertise?.
    5. Could Yudha and Mega's office advertise?
  5. Get all courses up and running and turning an income. In this more established phase, we want to be good for all-comers in the subject areas we teach.
  6. Incrementally improve the technological sophistication.
  7. If not done already:.
    1. Get degree-granting status.
    2. Roll out a truly VLOI full degree program charging market-level fees.

 

Reviewing courses

Keeping courses up to date and relevant will pose a challenge, especially as the improvement cycle will probably be quite short. They need to be reviewed each time they are offered.

 

Degree approval cycle

Many campus-based programs run degree programs in very long cycles. It takes a year to review a program structure and get the degree committee to approve it, after which it runs for five years. Consequently, students can enroll in degrees that are five years out of date.

To do better at keeping up to date, we need to shorten this cycle substantially, perhaps to two years. The consequences are as follows:

  1. Applications for permits to issue degrees should contain
  2. Frequent, major changes increase the risk of program destabilization, which demoralizes both staff and students.
  3. These kinds of structural changes are not so necessary for programs that are open-ended conduits for creativity, such as research units and doctoral programs.
  4. When the review specifies specific content and methods, major changes increase the risk of program destabilization, which demoralizes both staff and students.
  5. We still need to be able to assure students that they will graduate with the degree they appied for. This is not so much of a challenge for shorter courses, but we should probably have an Associate degree as a graduation point for undergraduate students.

 

Semester cycle

Start the semester with a meeting to evaluate in overview the last time the course was run. This includes evaluating the notes from the end of semester review, and looking at the materials. Did students like it? Did tutors like it? Did the overall approach work? Did the sequencing work? Does the research literature show any major changes in the content?

 

Weekly cycle

  1. Each week in a meeting, review:
  2. Plan changes to the week’s lesson, e.g improvements in teaching, updates in information based on recent research
  3. Write changes into a new version of the lesson. This could be done in day-by-day increments.
  4. Deploy. This could also be done in day-by-day increments, especially if lessons are issued in daily increments. As students take lessons, examine the analytics for trends and note them down.

Revising text will generally be easy, revising some kinds of pre-recorded talking head tutorials is more difficult, and revising documentaries will be very difficult. Hopefully, Programmed Instruction will need only minor changes as it needs thorough field-testing before deployment.