Why Modular Course Design

The Course Development & Training team at Oregon State University Ecampus promotes modular course design in our online courses. Laura Crowder (2011) defines modular content as “a collection of learning resources developed as a single learning object”. The major benefits of modular course design include:

Saving time in the development and updating of course content
Modular components are easily repurposed across courses
Student learning is improved since the content is presented in smaller chunks

Modular Course Design in Online Education

Modular course design has been highly recommended by various pioneers in online education. Stephen Downes (Downes, 1998) stated in “The Future of Online Learning” that, “…Online courses will be modular. A course – especially from the designer level – will no longer be seen as a single unit, but rather, as a collection of component parts, each of which may be replaced or upgraded as the need arises.” Andrea Henne (Kelly, 2009) recommended that “modular course design benefits online instructors and students.” The Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education Final Report (2014) suggests “an action plan that includes the goals to identify any new or existing MITx course that could be produced as modules; produce the “sticky” modules associated with these subjects; define a limited set of standalone (“smooth”) modules and produce these; put in place a well-organized repository of existing and new modules and define guidelines for building and credentialing customized courses.”

Modular Course Design at OSU Ecampus

With Ecampus’s move to Canvas, modular course design is even easier to implement. Our online courses are generally formatted into 11 weeks as 11 modules. We used a modular course design template for creating each week’s learning content, which includes:

weekly overviews
learning objectives
pre-quiz
assigned readings
lectures
resources
appropriate activities such as graded and non-graded assignments
discussions
assessments
post-quiz
wrap-up

Our template is very similar to Henne’s template (Kelly, 2009), which consists of learning objectives, see table 1 for comparison of the two templates.

Table 1. Comparison of Global Public Health – H 333’s course design template and Henne’s course design template.

This weekly modular template, however, should not limit us from organizing learning content into even smaller units within a weekly module. Here is an example of two modular learning content units within one week in Global Public Health – H 333. The highlighted boxes show two modular content units within Week 1.

Image 1. Screenshot of Global Public Health – H 333 online course Week 1 Learning module

Therefore, if you have a course that has heavy content within each week, feel free to break them into smaller learning modules instead of putting them together as a long big piece.

Enjoy designing and teaching online in Canvas.

References:
Crowder, L. (2011). How to develop modular content in 4 easy steps. retrieved from http://www.learninghouse.com/blog/publishing/how-to-develop-modular-content-in-4-easy-steps on July 28, 2015.

Downes, S. (1998). The Future of Online Learning. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Volume I, Number 3, Fall 1998. State University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center.

Kelly, Rob. (2009). A Modular Course Design Benefits Online Instructor and Students. Faculty Focus. September 2009. Retrieved on July 24th, 2015 from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/a-modular-course-design-benefits-online-instructor-and-students/

Institute-wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education: Final Report, July 28, 2013, pp. 49–50.

In the classroom we often discuss readings and other sources of information. Because students are often accustomed to digital communications in which sources are rarely cited, they can benefit from guidance concerning your expectations regarding citation. The instructor for TCE 512, Psychology of the Adolescent, worked with Ecampus to create an infographic through which she provides such guidance.

This infographic is licensed under a Creative Commons license, so you can feel free to download and post it in your own courses. Also, remember that we enjoy collaborating with Ecampus instructors to create innovative resources, so if you have any interesting ideas we would love to work with you!

Analytics in an Ecampus course can be a valuable source of information about students. It can help the instructor quickly “see” student progress through an online course and communicate with students that may be at risk, or look for patterns of behavior that may help guide future course improvements.

Within Canvas there are several different areas in which to review statistics and data to measure the success and activity of students within your course.

1. Course Analytics

From the Home page of a course in Canvas, click on “View Course Analytics”. Course Analytics will display the overall Activity, Assignment status, and Grades within a course across all of the students.

Click on a student name to focus in more detail on one activity and progress within the course.

2. Last Login

Though an instructor can determine the Last Login date for a student from the Canvas Analytics page, the People tool also allows an instructor to quickly check last activity of students within the course.

3. Detailed Page Views and Participation

The Access Report can also be found under the People tool. It allows an instructor to view detailed student activity such as the number of times each page/tool in the course was accessed by a student and the most recent access date.

Currently students do not have access to view their own Analytics but hopefully in the future, they also can see how they are participating in the course to ensure they progress steadily towards success!

Resources

Want to find out more about Canvas Analytics? Review the Help guides at Canvas:

With the migration to Canvas comes many new features and methods for facilitating your course. stock-photo-female-tourist-holding-a-map-890139 The Canvas Guides provide a lot of information, but you may be wondering, where do I even start? Here at Ecampus, we’ve put together a few guides to help you become familiar with some of the tools in Canvas.

First, if you’re wondering, “I did this in Blackboard, but I can’t find it in Canvas; how do I…?”, we’ve created a few design options for that. These design options explore how to adapt features that you’ve used in Blackboard to the new Canvas environment.

We’ve also created some more in depth quick references that help explain how to use some of the most popular Canvas features.

The Quick Reference guides and other helpful Canvas-specific information can be found on our Canvas Faculty Resources page. We also have a list of resources for teaching an online course on our Teaching Resources page where you can find our favorite presentation, web-conferencing, and other tools.

Are there other features you’ve discovered or some you’d like to know more about? Leave your feedback in the comments!

Where can I find Open Educational Resources (OER)?

Here is a list of Websites that offer (OERs) – open source (copyright free) materials, such as images, audio, and textbooks.

Search Creative Commons
This site allows you to search for resources using Europeana, Flickr, Fotopedia, Google, Google Images, Jamendo, Open Clip Art Library, SpinXpress, Wikimedia Commons, YouTube, Pixabay, ccMixter, and SoundCloud. Along with providing a selection of search services, Search Creative Commons allows you to filter your search for materials that you can use either for commercial purposes or for materials that can be modified and adapted in order to meet different needs.

OER Commons
This site offers support services and open educational resources (OERs) in a multitude of subject areas, grade levels, and material types (all of which are categorized and offered in a searchable database).

The Orange Grove
This site is Florida’s digital repository, which allows free and open access to its collection of instructional materials (including textbooks) to the public.

“Universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” –Ron Mace, NCSU Center for Universal Design

A fundamental of online instructional design is that learning materials should be accessible to all students. Ecampus works closely with faculty to ensure accessibility of course content for everyone. For example, since some students cannot hear an audio track on a lecture video, it’s essential that a transcript of the narration or closed captioning is provided.

Martha Smith and Gabe Merrell are OSU campus leaders in universal design and accessibility, and frequently discuss universal design for instruction with OSU faculty and staff. Martha is Director of Disability Access Services, and Gabe is Senior Accessibility Associate and Deputy ADA Coordinator in the Office of Equity and Inclusion. They note that the principles of universal design offer guidance for the design of every element of an instructor’s “toolkit,” from syllabi to presentation of content, course activities and assessments. They point out that universal design benefits all learners. For instance, some students who can hear the audio track on a lecture video find that they learn more if they take a few extra minutes to read the companion transcript.

Gabe and Martha emphasize the importance of considering universal design up front in the development of teaching materials, instructional methods and means of assessing student learning. This is the approach the Ecampus Course Development and Training team takes with online and hybrid course development. As Ecampus serves an increasingly diverse student population, universal design enhances learning in the online classroom.

Ecampus instructional designer Melanie Kroening has created a great guide called 5 Accessibility Tips for “DIY” Course Designers that provides practical techniques for instructors to enhance the accessibility of course content.

To find out more about universal design, speak to any Ecampus instructional designer, contact Martha Smith or Gabe Merrell or visit the Center for Universal Design in Education.

Ecampus launched the Quality Matters (QM) initiative in 2013. QM is a continuous improvement model for assuring the quality of online courses through a collegial faculty review process. QM focuses on the design of online and hybrid classes, as opposed to the delivery or content of the courses. The QM rubric and trainings are

Based upon national standards of best practice, research, and instructional design principles;
Designed to promote student learning;
Integral to continuous quality improvement; and
Part of a faculty-driven, collegial peer review process.

The QM rubric is comprised of research-based standards, all about course design (as distinct from course content and facilitation). The rubric consists of eight general categories, with 41 specific standards. To achieve QM certification, a course must meet all 17 of the 3-point essential standards and must meet a minimum threshold of 81/95 points overall.

To improve the learning experience for Ecampus students and to help OSU faculty who wish to pursue QM course certification, the Ecampus Course Development and Training unit has developed a QM-based course template used as the foundation for the design of new and newly updated online courses. This template meets about half of the QM standards, all before any specific course content is added, and is already being used in approximately 100 courses.

To explore the Ecampus QM-based course template, log in to Blackboard using the username dce_qm and the password ecampus. If you would like to use the QM template in your online course, please contact Shannon Riggs, Ecampus Director of Course Development and Training, at shannon.riggs@oregonstate.edu.

One of the trends of 2014 is the explosion of infographics. Although they have been around for centuries, the creation of infographics has been limited to specialists such as cartographers, graphic designers, and others who specialize in data visualization.

The popularity of data visualization experienced a surge in 2006 when Hans Rosling created the free Gapminder tool and presented The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen on the TED stage. He demonstrated the need for easily accessible tools regular people could use to transform complex information into easy-to-comprehend visual format.

The word infographic has undergone a shift in popular usage over the last three years. In the past, it meant anything that conveyed data or complex information in visual format, including charts and graphs. It now refers to digital posters in which graphics are used to present any type of information. This shift is due in large part to the proliferation of many online tools which make the creation of infographics incredibly easy.

Leading the pack among the vast number of online infographics creation tools are Infogr.am, Pictochart, and InfoActive.

The ease of use makes infographic tools ideal for student use. Instructors can create assignments in which students are asked to create infographics which they then share with their classmates. These can be highly engaging when used as discussion starters.

Here is an example of an infographic we created for the course GRAD 550–Introduction to Online Course Development and Facilitation.

The 2013 Survey of Online Learning Report was released last week on the Sloan Consortium website. This annual series tracks trends in online higher ed in the U.S. through use of institutional data and responses from chief academic officers at colleges and universities nationally. Among key findings of the 2013 survey, three-fourths of chief academic officers think the learning outcomes in online education are the same or better than with face-to-face instruction, but more than 40% of them say that retaining students in online courses is more difficult than in face-to-face courses.

Fortunately, Blackboard has built-in tools to help you monitor student progress. In addition to the Grade Center, check out the Performance Dashboard and Retention Center in the Evaluation section of your Blackboard course Control Panel. These tools can be used with no set up, though you do have the option to customize the Retention Center. The Performance Dashboard gives you a quick overview of each student’s online course activity (for example, days since last Blackboard course access, and level of discussion board participation). The Retention Center provides a more detailed picture of which students may be struggling or at risk in your course. A glance at the Performance Dashboard and Retention Center can give you a heads-up at any point in the term about student engagement and success, so that you can take steps to communicate with students about your concerns and offer strategies for improvement.

Beyond this, make sure your students know about the Ecampus Student Success links, which direct students to Ecampus Success Counselors, online tutoring support, Academic Success (ALS) courses, personalized coaching services from InsideTrack, and other services available to OSU online students.

What strategies do you find most successful in retaining online students in your courses?

Occasionally in my work with faculty I find them wanting to reproduce a brainstorming session activity from the brick and mortar classroom. They want students to ‘shout out’ ideas, arguments, or topics and create a list so that everyone can participate and the best ideas can ‘float’ to the surface. There is value in pooling ideas to generate all possibilities given the varying background knowledge of students.

In OSU’s learning system, Blackboard, there are tools such as wikis and discussions that can allow students to generate ideas but these tools don’t always have the options needed to take the ideas and vote on them and have the class decide which are the best.

Tricider

So one alternative option is the free digital tool Tricider. Tricider is an efficient online brainstorming and polling tool.

I stumbled across Tricider as I do many tools by reading popular educational technology blogs and bookmarking my favorites, examine any limitations it may have, and then I use it in my own online classroom. After the first term of using it, I found that Tricider required few instructions, did not require a login by my students, and was simple and intuitive to use. Those faculty that use this tool find that it is the only tool that really does what it does.

When would you want to use Tricider:

In an icebreaker activity
To brainstorm and collect ideas (class or small group)
To brainstorm solutions and list pros/cons of each
To brainstorm ideas and vote on them so the favorites rise to the top
Have small groups brainstorm and share or compare/contrast their ideas with others

How to get started?

Go to http://tricider.com, create an account if you want to be able to revisit your “questions”
Type in a question and click on Go
Change the deadline if you wish it to be open more than 14 days
Click on Share and Invite
Copy and paste the URL anywhere that your audience can access the link
Brainstorm and/or Vote!

Try it out: http://tricider.com/brainstorming/1GEq1

Melanie Kroening
(Instructional Designer, Ecampus)

Ecampus Course Development and Training

Providing inspiration for your online class

Category Archives: Resources, Tools & Trends

Modular Course Design at OSU Ecampus

Why Modular Course Design

Modular Course Design in Online Education

Modular Course Design at OSU Ecampus

Citations in Online Discussions

Canvas – Analytics

1. Course Analytics

2. Last Login

3. Detailed Page Views and Participation

Resources

Canvas Resources and Guides

Locating OER

Universal Design for Learning

Ecampus QM Course Template

Infographics

Retaining Students Online: Pathways to Success

Collaborative Brainstorming (Online)

Tricider

When would you want to use Tricider:

How to get started?

Contact Info