QM: Evaluating Your Course Design

This winter I am working toward adding a new credential to my learning: Quality Matter's Teaching Online Certificate. This well-established and highly respected organization has put together a series of workshops that focuses on best practices of online teaching. I plan to reflect on each workshop as I complete them as a way to model metacognition.

The second workshop I participated in was EYCD- Evaluating Your Course Design. This workshop was a two-day synchronous session (the first workshop was an asynchronous weeklong commitment). The audience was very small- only three participants. This was both slightly awkward but also an advantage. Having such a small group meant we had the opportunity to ask detailed questions of the facilitator. It also forced me to pay attention the entire time! Often, its very easy to become distracted when there is a larger crowd and your camera can be off. 

An additional bonus was the use of a new video conferencing platform for me: Engageli. While this platform is very similar to the usual suspects (i.e., Zoom, Meet, WebEx, etc.) it had a standout feature for me. Within the interface, I had the ability to pull up a notes document in the same screen to take detailed notes. Even better, with the click of a mouse I could take a screenshot of the slide that was being projected and have it automatically loaded into my private notes. This gave me the ability to capture what I needed in the moment and not have to race to write things down. After each day, I downloaded the notes which opened as a Word document. 

We looked at four areas of a course we have taught online:

1. Activities & Tools
2. Assessments
3. Instructional Materials
4. Evaluating Objectives

I chose to focus on an upcoming course I teach in the spring: Edu 790- Social Media and Emerging Technologies. Here are some of the notes I took that stood out to me.

Activities & Tools

During this part of the workshop we looked at the Community of Inquiry framework and how important it is to include all three interactions on a consistent basis in an online course. I've presented on this topic and feel it is one of the areas I cover well in my design. We also discussed how learning activities should allow students to practice goals and objectives. Tools such as discussion boards, videos, etc. should support the objectives- no using tech for tech's sake!

An area I need to improve on, however, is linking to the accessibility policies of the technologies I require my students to use in this course. This isn't something I've thought about in the past.

Assessments

The biggest takeaway from this section was to make sure that rubrics are clear, specific, and easy to find. It was also suggested to make sure whatever is listed in the Learning Management System for grades is the same in the syllabus. For example, the LMS might have point totals whereas the rubric has a percentage scale listed. 

Instructional Materials

Instructional materials are SO important in an online, asynchronous course! Materials should help students achieve the learning goals. When they don't align is when we most often hear complaints of 'busy work' from students. Materials can be anything from textbooks, presentations, videos, images, websites, graphics, and more. Further, the characteristics of our materials makes a difference. This includes:

1. Accessibility- are the materials accessible?
2. Accuracy- are they free of errors and correct?
3. Active Engagement- to the materials invite cognitive, behavioral, or emotional engagement?
4. Clarity- do the materials provide clarity to understanding the concept?
5. Currency- are the materials up-to-date? If not, are they foundational or necessary? The general rule of thumb is no more than 5 years old unless foundational
6. Credibility- are the sources credible?

It's also extremely important to make sure PDFs are 'selectable' and 'searchable' to meet accessibility standards. Selectable means you can highlight text whereas searchable means you can use "Command+F" to find something within the document. If neither of these is actionable, a screen reader may not be able to read the PDF contents making it inaccessible to someone with a visual impairment.

Evaluating Objectives

This was the biggest area of growth for me personally. While I had program and course objectives (CLOs) in my syllabus I haven't taken a hard look at the wording in quite some time. Many of my course objectives were not measurable. Yikes. This workshop reminded me that while I know what the objectives are for the course it doesn't mean my students know. I also didn't have individual module objectives (MLOs)! I include a section titled "Why This is Important" in each module but that is more focused on how our topic relates to education and the course. After this workshop, I rewrote both my CLOs and created new MLOs and made sure they were aligned to the CLOs so students understand why I am talking about the topics I am. The next goal is to add a separate page within each module for the objectives.

Other suggestions from the workshop:

• Create a course map to share with students to show how everything is aligned
• Best practice is 3-5 objectives per module (but there is no magic number)
• Graduate courses should have verbs from the higher levels of Blooms Taxonomy in objective statements
• Add objectives to your "Start Here" module
• Make sure they are included in each module
• Consider adding them to my course and module overview videos and/or
• Find a way to reword and weave them into my "Why This is Important" section