2. Quality Online

Core design elements every online course should have

As you look at the continuum between a fully face-to-face course and a fully online course, one key dimension at play is communication. We can’t rely on contact time during classroom hours the way we can when we teach face-to-face. Because of the challenges of asynchronous communication, online facilitation requires us to think and plan more deliberately about how we communicate to our students, what we communicate, and when. Without your teaching presence, without your efforts to communicate the course organization, and your expectations, the result can be disorienting to students who are looking to instructors to provide value to their learning through guidance and feedback.

We tackle the communication issue on multiple fronts, and one of the key fronts is to ensure that our online courses have key elements that are considered by quality standards to provide the necessary supports students need to be successful. When we build and teach an online course, the more asynchronous the course, the more the presence of these elements become a priority for a quality learning experience. In essence, we move the communication of critical course elements into explicit learning materials in the course. In this way, we can ensure that we cover off the critical elements that students need.

And what are these elements and who has decided that they are essential? The elements encompass the teaching areas of assigning tasks, delivering content & sharing expertise, giving and gathering feedback, and providing student support. Much of what we do in our classrooms is a holistic combination of these tasks that we are rarely conscious of. However, when we think about how to move some or all of these elements online, we face the communication gap. In order to overcome this communication gap, and to reduce the transactional distance, we must be deliberate in providing these elements in alternative ways. And we also first have to be aware of what they are. The history of distance-based education, moving from paper-based to online delivery, has taught us what they are, why they are important and how to achieve them, when considering the extreme end of the continuum, a fully asynchronous course.

A number of different institutions and organizations have developed quality checklists of what these elements are, with the idea of working backwards. A checklist tells us what is important and what will be assessed. Therefore, we ensure that we have included those elements so that we may be successful in an assessment.

Quality standards for online learning come from a robust body of research and for a global compendium of various schemes that articulate quality, you can check Tony Bates’ collection, E-learning quality assurance standards, organizations and research

A popular one is from Quality Matters, and the main sections of their checklist are:

• Course Overview and Introduction
• Learning Objectives (Competencies)
• Assessment and Measurement
• Instructional Materials
• Learning Activities and Learner Interaction
• Course Technology
• Learner Support
• Accessibility and Usability

These all need to be in place within a course and aligned (e.g. assessment must be aligned with learning objectives).

BCIT has developed our own BCIT Online Course Quality Checklist and it covers the elements that we would like to see online. Click on the link to open and save your own version.

You will see that it parallels the Quality Matters main sections; however, it has been designed with the needs of a polytechnic teaching environment in mind. Also note that it does not include the teaching elements of being an online facilitator, nor any list of duties. It is focused on ‘the what’ of what is online. It is the stuff that you might see already there when you log into an online course.

Going back to the concepts of presence, and teaching presence specifically, the first place where students get a sense of your teaching presence is in the design of your online course. Online teaching shares the same needs as classroom teaching, but because we take them for granted in the classroom, they might feel unnecessarily artificial online. For example, in the list of what makes good online design above, number one is having a section in your online course that is the Course Overview and Introduction. Essentially, we call this the how-to of the course, where you are telling students how the course works, and how to be successful. This section parallels the first day of a campus-based class when we explain the very same thing. Designing and developing your online course means being deliberate about these elements to ensure that they are present because we know that students need them to be successful. Including them projects to students the presence of an instructor deliberately and thoughtfully guiding their learning experience.

Approaching planning your online teaching with a learning design framework encourages the avoidance of practices that result in online courses that replicate unhelpful teaching practices from the classroom in the online environment. Designs that enable positive online learning experiences contain opportunities for collaboration and communication, reflection, and knowledge development. Having a clear learning design approach entails thinking about your students’ journey through your course (which is what a course syllabus does) and will help you decide, if you are planning a blended course, which elements will be best served by everyone being together on campus, and which by being online.

Quality in the Development Process

A second angle to the quality element is designing and developing your course using a tested process.  Just like designing for classroom-based courses, we have three key decisions for designing our online courses:

1. What do I want students to learn? (answer: learning outcomes)
2. How will students (and the instructor) know if these goals are being accomplished? (answer: feedback and assessment)
3. What will the instructor and students need to do in order for students to achieve the learning outcomes? (answer: teaching / learning activities)

When we shift our teaching to online, the emphasis shifts from preparing class sessions to preparing learning modules with specific goals, reading assignments, brief instructional materials, learning activities, assessment procedures and more. If you are teaching using synchronous tools, you will still need to prepare your live sessions as you would for your campus-based class, but you will also be attempting to cross the barriers the technologies create with specific activities you might not employ when you are in the same place and the same time with your students. While you design your online course materials, you should regularly ask:

1. What do I want students to learn in this module?
2. How will students demonstrate their learning of the materials in this module?
3. What assignments or learning activities will support the learning for this module?
4. Decide how you want to teach.

And use the quality checklists as a planning tool. Work backwards in your planning and development from the quality checklist to help you:

• strive for clarity in writing, in layout, and online course design.
• help the learner to easily find what they need to know.
• make sure the “pieces” of your plan connect or align. Is there, for example, a recognizable path from stated outcomes to planned learning activities and potential assessments?
• choose technologies that support the learning, are easy to access and use.
• make sure your plan and activity include a sense of time – when they need to be started and completed and estimates of time for the instructor and the learner.

A note about specific educational technologies:

There are thousands of tools available online. There are also many tools already integrated directly into the BCIT Learning Hub, which you may not be familiar with or have not previously used.  Many of the online (not Learning Hub-based) tools are free or minimal cost, while others are quite expensive and complex to master. These are factors to keep in mind when selecting tools you want to explore. Further, at BCIT, for each digital and internet-based tool we would like to introduce to our class that is not supported by the Institute, we are required to complete a Privacy Impact Statement and submit it for review and approval as per Policy Procedure 5900-PR3 Educational Technology Privacy Compliance.

We will not be going into any detail about specific tools, as integrating technologies into your teaching is the topic of our course, POLY 1020 Teaching with Technology. We do, however, speak to the use of the discussion forum and web conferencing tools, as these are the common digital spaces used for many direct teaching and learning through discussion activities.