Creating Course Content
Best Practices for Online Teaching
This first module in this course identified ways to prepare for teaching online. This module addresses the development of course materials.
In this module, we will discuss:
I have taught a course face-to-face for several years and will be moving my courses online. What types of assignments should I include in my online course?
Deciding what activities to include in your course requires planning and careful consideration of resources. Activities should address your stated learning objectives. This lesson will provide you with some tools and processes that will help you develop objectives and effective activities for your online courses.
I often locate items such as articles, images, handouts, or diagrams for my courses. Am I allowed to use these items in my courses?
It depends. Some items such as materials produced by the government or those that have passed out of copyright protection are in Public Domain and available for use without formal clearance. Some individuals and organizations permit use for "for educational purposes." Others have restrictions that do not permit their publications to be placed in an electronic environment, while others permit use as long as access is restricted by password or some other means.
The library at CFCC can help you with reserves for courses and there are other statewide resources where you can locate content to use in your courses (e.g. NCLive).
This lesson identifies some concepts related to intellectual property and methods to help you determine which materials you can use in your online courses.
The lesson will discuss the importance of organizing course materials.
After completing this lesson, learners will be able to:
Once you have your introductory materials developed and organized, you should give careful consideration to how you will organize materials in your course.
Having a well-organized course will decrease student confusion and stress and will make learning more enjoyable.
Think of your course organization as a file cabinet, with different navigation items as hanging file folders (staff information, textbooks, lessons, etc.). Within each hanging file folder, there might be other folders (lesson 1, lesson 2, etc.). Inside these folders will reside separate items, such as "lesson overview", "objectives", "readings", etc. You might choose to have assignments (quizzes, papers, etc.) in their own "hanging file folder" (i.e. "Assignments") or have them included in the appropriate Lesson folder. The idea is to keep things well-organized, consistent, and easy to find. Students (and the instructor) should be able to easily develop a mental model of where things reside for easy access.
Try not to create too many levels of folders and subfolders since this can be confusing and users can get lost after so much clicking. Keep things no more than three clicks away from the main page, if possible. Here is one possible arrangement for your course structure (items in the navigation menu of your learning management system):
It might be helpful if you create a flowchart of your course structure and/or of main areas in your course. You can use something like Microsoft Word's SmartArt tools or the free web-based Mindomo to create your flowchart. The sample below shows the organization of some course lessons (this can be done after determining lesson objectives and effective activities to meet the objectives):
Now that you have a sense of how you will organize the course, the next lesson will help you write lesson objectives.
This lesson focuses on how to write measurable lesson objectives. The objectives and lesson overview will guide the development of activities to be completed by students (readings, quizzes, assignments, projects, etc.).
After completing this lesson, learners will be able to:
This is the time to ask yourself, "At the end of this lesson, I want students to be able to...". Identify what you would like for students to be able to do after completing the lesson. Objectives can include knowing facts, understanding concepts, acquiring or improving skills, and developing awareness.
Learning objectives help students understand what is expected from them and how their progress is being measured. Effective teaching depends on how clearly students understand what they are supposed to learn and how accurately learning can be measured (Lewis, 2001).
Objectives describe the intended results, outcomes, or changes. As you develop your lesson objectives ( what is to be measured), consider how you will measure the results, outcomes, or changes. In other words, you must have some way to know whether or not the objective has been met.
Many instructors choose to use Bloom's Taxonomy as a guide for developing course and lesson objectives. If you are not familiar with it, Bloom's Taxonomy is a multi-tiered model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity. This taxonomy is hierarchical, meaning that categories at lower levels should be mastered before moving to higher levels (Forehand, 2005).
The revised Bloom's Taxonomy includes the following six major categories:
(Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
In addition to the six categories of Bloom's Taxonomy, consider the type of objective you will write:
(Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001)
The following table, adapted from Oregon State's Extended Campus, might be helpful in identifying types of activities that correspond to the type of objective for each of Bloom's categories:
| Remember | Understand | Apply | Analyze | Evaluate | Create | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Factual Knowledge |
List |
Summarize |
Classify |
Order |
Rank |
Combine |
| Conceptual Knowledge |
Describe |
Interpret |
Experiment |
Explain |
Assess |
Plan |
| Procedural Knowledge |
Tabulate |
Predict |
Calculate |
Differentiate |
Conclude |
Compose |
| Meta-Cognitive Knowledge |
Appropriate Use |
Execute |
Construct |
Achieve |
Action |
Actualize |
The next lesson, Developing Course Activities, will provide you with further information about selecting course activities that meet your stated objectives.
Self Check: Place the following revised Bloom's Taxonomy categories in the correct order, starting from the lower level.
Self Check: Match the type of objective (using Bloom's taxonomy) with the type of activity.
Portions of this lesson were adapted from Liz Stover's Best Practices for Distance Learning.
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of educational objectives: Complete edition, New York : Longman.
Forehand, M. (2005). Bloom's taxonomy: Original and revised.. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved January 20, 2010, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/
Lewis, K. G. (2001). Why write objectives? Retrieved January 20, 2010, from Center for Teaching Effectiveness: http://www.utexas.edu/academic/diia/gsi/coursedesign/writeobjectives.pdf
Oregon State University . (2004). OSU extended campus: Course development: Instructional design -The Taxonomy Table. Retrieved January 20, 2010 from http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/coursedev/models/id/taxonomy/
This lesson focuses on how to develop course activities to meet your stated objectives.
After completing this lesson, learners will be able to:
Now that you have identified your course and lesson objectives, it's time to create activities to meet these objectives.
How will you know whether or not students know facts, understand concepts, have acquired or improved skills, or have developed awareness? Your selection of assignments and tests will influence your students' motivation (Achacoso & Svinicki, 2004).
Quality teaching requires developing understanding of the complex relationships between technology, content, and pedagogy, and using this understanding to develop effective teaching strategies (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).
Before you start creating course activities, it is important for you to take inventory of available resources for the instructor and the students. Creating activities that require resources that are out of reach for the instructor and/or students will result in frustration and confusion. Taking inventory of the required resources will also allow you to provide students with this important information at the beginning of the course.
What resources are available to you? Instructor resources include:
What resources are available to your students? Student resources include:
A course mapping matrix might help you organize course activities around stated objectives. Creating a course mapping matrix is not difficult. You can simply create a table with objectives listed in one column and the activities listed in the top row. Check the appropriate table cell where the activities address objectives. A small sample of course mapping matrix is listed below:
| Course Objectives Students will be able to: |
Personas Activity | XHTML Quiz | Discussion: Copyright Role Play |
Peer Review: Web Prototype |
Assignment: Web Developer Toolbar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Describe target users for Website |
X
|
|
|
|
|
| Critique Web sites for usability. |
|
|
|
X
|
|
| Write valid xhtml code. |
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
| Create Section 508 compliant Web pages. |
|
|
|
|
X
|
| Evaluate Web design for target audience. |
|
|
|
X
|
|
| Evaluate potential copyright and Fair Use issues. |
|
|
X
|
|
|
As you consider the types of activities to include in your course, you might want to browse a list of the variety of activities available (presented in alphabetical order):
You should use a variety of methods to assess students' work in order to accommodate different learning styles and provide a rich and interactive learning environment. Your selection of assessment methods should address the type of learning you want students to achieve in the course. Plagiarism and cheating can be decreased by using creative and project-based assignments. If you still have difficulty developing activities for your course after consulting the Bloom's Taxonomy table in the "Writing Lesson Objectives" lesson, reviewing the list of activities, and using the Course Mapping Matrix, consult with your instructional designer/technology for some ideas on how to address your learning objectives with interesting and stimulating activities.
Now that you have an idea of the types of activities you want to include in your course, the next lesson, "Best Practices for Assignments", will focus on best practices for implementing some of these tools.
Portions of this lesson were adapted from Liz Stover's Best Practices for Distance Learning.
Achacoso, M. V., & Svinicki, M.D. (2004). Alternative strategies for evaluating student learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Koehler, M.J. & Mishra, P. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.
This lesson focuses on some best practices for developing and delivering assignments. This includes general guidelines for all types of activities and more specific guidelines for certain types of assignments (i.e. quizzes/test and papers).
After completing this lesson, learners will be able to:
Create assignments that motivate students, have clearly stated instructions, and measure what you want students to learn.
Including assignments that address the stated learning objectives will help ensure that students learn what you want to measure. Careful planning will minimize the possibility of cheating and plagiarism and will result in course activities that motivate students and make them want to learn.
As you learned in the previous lesson, "Developing Course Activities", there are many types of assignments you can use in your course. Your selection will depend on the lesson objectives, the target audience, your course content, resources, and on your teaching style.
While it might be tempting to create several self-grading quizzes as the only method of assessment of your course, it is advisable to include a variety of assessment types to speak to different learning styles, minimize cheating, and to keep students interested and motivated. We could spend an entire course on creating effective assessments, but we will cover just a few techniques here.
There are some general guidelines you should follow for all assignments. Provide clear, detailed instructions for students on how to complete and submit assignments. While this might seem self-evident to you, students might have different expectations from different instructors and some may have never taken an online course before. Let students know what you expect. Your instructions should include:
Self Check: File Names
When creating a quiz or test for your online course, make sure to tie it in to lesson objectives. This will help you develop questions and select the types of questions to use. Refer to the Bloom's Taxonomy table in the "Writing Lesson Objectives" lesson to identify potential question types. If you are concerned with factual knowledge and Bloom's category, remember, you might include multiple choice questions to have students select correct answers (i.e. identify the function of the given html tags). If you are concerned with conceptual knowledge and Bloom's category, evaluate, you might create short answer questions and have students explain why examples of Web pages do or do not meet accessibility criteria. It is likely that you want to assess different levels of thinking so include the types of questions that will enable you to assess these different levels.
Remember, you should use a variety of assessment types in your course. Instead of relying heavily on self-grading quizzes, you might choose to use quizzes as self-tests or as preparation for larger tests. Make sure your quiz questions address lesson objectives and create several questions about objectives to provide you with more data points.
In addition to developing effect quiz/test questions, you should familiarize yourself with the course management system that delivers the quizzes and tests. Follow suggested guidelines to minimize student and instructor frustration. Often, problems can be significantly decreased by careful design of assessments.
View Best Practices for Quizzes and Tests (html)
When designing discussion assignments, consider how the discussion will meet lesson objectives, how much time is required for participation, and how to gauge a student's performance.
There are a number of strategies you to create motivating discussion assignments in your online course. Use different discussion formats listed below to cultivate students' critical thinking (MacKnight 2000, p40.):
As the facilitator continues the course design process, the assessment of student participation in threaded discussion becomes an obvious cornerstone for successful learning community development (Edelstein, 2002). Encourage student participation by:
If you would like to explore this topic more, check out Penn State's "Introduction to Crafting Questions for On-line Discussions".
Instructors are frequently concerned about cheating and plagiarism when developing course activities. This is another good reason to provide a variety of assessment types in your course. If your entire assessment relies on a series of multiple choice quizzes, expect that copies exist. There is no surefire way to prevent copying of a quiz so your best defense is to create assessments where cheating and plagiarism are difficult to carry out.
Papers can also be obtained through paper mills, former students, etc. This is especially true for general topics and for assignments that have been used many times. This is where we will start discussing specific ways to minimize cheating and plagiarism.
First, clearly state your college's academic dishonesty policy in the syllabus. The CFCC Academic Dishonesty policy can be viewed in the Student Handbook section of the CFCC Course Catalog. Students should know what constitutes plagiarism and cheating and that they are taken seriously. You might include a question about this topic in your course's icebreaker assignment. Also, sometimes students plagiarize because they do not know how to properly paraphrase or cite sources. Make sure you provide students with writing resources. For example, if you require that students submit essays with APA Style formatting, provide them with links to the current APA Style Manual or online tutorials.
In addition to stating your school's policy and offering writing guidance, there are a number of things you can do when designing activities to decrease the possibility of cheating and plagiarism. Below are some suggestions to help you create such activities:
You can learn more about these strategies and others by reading Arthur Sterngold's article, "Confronting Plagiarism: How Conventional Teaching Invites Cyber-Cheating", available through NCLIVE.
About Anti-plagiarism Software:
While careful assessment design is by far the best way to prevent plagiarism and cheating, many of you have heard about tools that check for plagiarism. Blackboard includes an anti-plagiarism software called SafeAssign, which allows instructors to check submitted papers against an internal and global database.
There are two ways to use SafeAssign:
Before implementing this tool, it is important to consider a few things:
Remember, the best way to decrease incidents of cheating and plagiarism is to carefully plan activities that motivate students. If you need assistance with creating or revising your course activities, contact your instructional technologist/designer.
This lesson completes the "Developing Course Content" module. We will now move forward to the "During Teaching" module.
Portions of this lesson were adapted from Liz Stover's Best Practices for Distance Learning.
Berge, Z.L. (1995). Facilitating Computer Conferencing: Recommendations From the Field. Educational Technology, 35(1), 22-30.
Edelstein, S., and Edwards, J. (2002). If you build it, they will come: Building learning communities through threaded discussions. The Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 5(1). Available Online: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/spring51/edelstein51.html
MacKnight, C.B. (2000). Teaching critical thinking through online discussions. EduCause Quarterly, 4, 38-41
Sterngold, A. (2004). Confronting plagiarism: How conventional teaching invites cyber-cheating. Change, 36(3), 16-22.
This lesson focuses on identifying and using course materials that do not violate copyright laws. All materials are either copyright protected or are in the public domain and can be used freely. There are some provisions for education that allow copyrighted material to be used and specific guidelines for using materials in distance education. This section will help you distinguish between copyrighted and public domain materials and whether or not you can use certain copyrighted materials in your course.
6.1 The tools and media support the learning objectives, and are appropriately chosen to deliver the content of the course.
After completing this lesson, learners will be able to:
Effective online instructors know how to use course materials according to intellectual property guidelines. Materials should not violate copyright laws. A work created since 1978 is considered automatically protected from the moment of its creation. There are some exceptions and limited amounts of materials can sometimes be legally used for educational purposes. Instructors should should be able to determine if materials are in the public domain or if fair use guidelines and the TEACH Act permit use of certain materials.
It is important that instructors respect intellectual property rights since any illegal use of copyrighted work can result in liability.
Now that you have learned about different copyright exemptions and types of licensing, here is a summary of guidelines to follow when determining if you can use a work in your course:
After identifying material that you can legitimately use for your course, it is important to cite sources correctly. Use the discipline-appropriate format (APA, MLA, etc.). Remember to model the behavior you expect from students. The most common style guides used are APA and MLA and both give specific information about summarizing or paraphrasing and quoting from a source. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) has an online guide to help with both APA Style and MLA Style.
Portions of this lesson were adapted from Liz Stover's Best Practices for Distance Learning.
Crews, K.D. (2002). New copyright law for distance education: The meaning and importance of the TEACH Act. Retrieved July 26, 2006, from American Library Association Web site: http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/copyrightb/distanceed/distanceeducation.htm#newc
Ragan, L. (2007, August 27). Best Practices in Online Teaching - Pulling it All Together - Introduction. Retrieved from the Connexions Web site: http://cnx.org/content/m15044/1.4/